#14501
Charles Laughton
1899 - 1962 (63 years)
Charles Laughton was an English actor. He was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and first appeared professionally on the stage in 1926. In 1927, he was cast in a play with his future wife Elsa Lanchester, with whom he lived and worked until his death.
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Claudio Monteverdi
1567 - 1643 (76 years)
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was an Italian composer, choirmaster and string player. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is considered a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque periods of music history.
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Maximus Planudes
1260 - 1305 (45 years)
Maximus Planudes was a Byzantine Greek monk, scholar, anthologist, translator, mathematician, grammarian and theologian at Constantinople. Through his translations from Latin into Greek and from Greek into Latin, he brought the Greek East and the Latin West into closer contact with one another. He is now best known as a compiler of the Greek Anthology.
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Frederic Goudy
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Frederic William Goudy was an American printer, artist and type designer whose typefaces include Copperplate Gothic, Goudy Old Style and Kennerley. He was one of the most prolific of American type designers and his self-named type continues to be one of the most popular in America.
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John Martin
1893 - 1985 (92 years)
John Martin became America's first major dance critic in 1927. Focusing his efforts on propelling the modern dance movement, he greatly influenced the careers of dancers such as Martha Graham. Within his life he wrote several books on the modern dance and received numerous awards for his work.
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Alice Neel
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Alice Neel was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s.
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Leo Amery
1873 - 1955 (82 years)
Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery , also known as L. S. Amery, was a British Conservative politician and journalist. During his career, he was known for his interest in military preparedness, British India and the British Empire and for his opposition to appeasement. After his retirement and death, he was perhaps best known for the remarks he made in the House of Commons on 7 May 1940 during the Norway Debate.
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Joyce Kilmer
1886 - 1918 (32 years)
Alfred Joyce Kilmer was an American writer and poet mainly remembered for a short poem titled "Trees" , which was published in the collection Trees and Other Poems in 1914. Though a prolific poet whose works celebrated the common beauty of the natural world as well as his Catholic faith, Kilmer was also a journalist, literary critic, lecturer, and editor. At the time of his deployment to Europe during World War I, Kilmer was considered the leading American Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation, whom critics often compared to British contemporaries G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc .
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Antonino Votto
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Antonino Votto, sometimes spelt Antonio Votto, was an Italian operatic conductor and vocal coach. Votto developed an extensive discography with the Teatro alla Scala in Milan during the 1950s, when EMI produced the bulk of its studio recordings featuring Maria Callas. Though Votto was a dependable conductor , critics frequently faulted his recordings for their lack of emotional immediacy. This may have been an occupational hazard of working in the studio, as his live sets with Callas, including a Norma and La sonnambula are considered to be great performances. Among his pupils was the sopr...
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Alois Walde
1869 - 1924 (55 years)
Alois Walde was an Austrian linguist. Alois Walde studied classical philology and comparative linguistics at the University of Innsbruck where he was awarded a PhD in 1894. The year after, he became a state employee at the university library. In 1895, he was awarded his habilitation and became a professor in 1904 at the University of Innsbruck. 1909-1912, Walde was Professor of comparative linguistics at the University of Giessen, but returned in 1912 to Innsbruck where he became the dean of faculty in 1914 and rector of the university in 1916. The year after, he became a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
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Mary Wigman
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Mary Wigman was a German dancer and choreographer, notable as the pioneer of expressionist dance, dance therapy, and movement training without pointe shoes. She is considered one of the most important figures in the history of modern dance. She became one of the most iconic figures of Weimar German culture and her work was hailed for bringing the deepest of existential experiences to the stage.
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James Cagney
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
James Francis Cagney Jr. was an American actor, dancer and film director. On stage and in film, he was known for his consistently energetic performances, distinctive vocal style, and deadpan comic timing. He won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances.
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Adolphe Pictet
1799 - 1875 (76 years)
Adolphe Pictet was a Swiss linguist, philologist and ethnologist. Pictet, the cousin of the biologist Francois Jules Pictet, is well known for his research in the field of comparative linguistics. He played a crucial formative role in the development of Ferdinand de Saussure; "it was Pictet who introduced the thirteen-year-old Saussure to the theoretical foundations of Indo-European linguistics." But he was also "a dedicated champion of German Romanticism and idealist philosophy":Like French, English, and Russian Romantics since the beginning of the century, he made a journey to Germany, where he became acquainted with A.
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Paul Gallico
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Paul William Gallico was an American novelist and short story and sports writer. Many of his works were adapted for motion pictures. He is perhaps best remembered for The Snow Goose, his most critically successful book, for the novel The Poseidon Adventure, primarily through the 1972 film adaptation, and for four novels about the beloved character of Mrs. Harris.
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Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
1915 - 1975 (60 years)
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was an Israeli philosopher, mathematician, and linguist. He was a pioneer in the fields of machine translation and formal linguistics. Biography Born Oscar Westreich in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, he was raised in Berlin. In 1933 he emigrated to Palestine with the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and briefly joined the kibbutz Tirat Zvi before settling in Jerusalem and marrying Shulamith.
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Irving Berlin
1888 - 1989 (101 years)
Irving Berlin was an American composer and lyricist. His music forms a large part of the Great American Songbook. Berlin received numerous honors including an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, and a Tony Award. He also received Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Gerald R. Ford in 1977. Journalist Walter Cronkite stated he "helped write the story of this country, capturing the best of who we are and the dreams that shape our lives".
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Vladimir I. Georgiev
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Vladimir Ivanov Georgiev was a prominent Bulgarian linguist, philologist, and educational administrator. Biography Vladimir Georgiev was born in the Bulgarian village of Gabare, near Byala Slatina and graduated in philology at Sofia University in 1930. He specialized in Indo-European, Slavic and general linguistics at the University of Vienna , and later at the universities of Berlin , Florence and Paris . Assistant Professor at Sofia University , Associated Professor , Professor , head of the department of general and comparative-historical linguistics at the Faculty of History and Philology at Sofia University , Dean of the Faculty of Philology , Vice-Rector , Rector .
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Martin Hattala
1821 - 1903 (82 years)
Martin Hattala was a Slovak pedagogue, Roman Catholic theologian and linguist. He is best known for his reform of the Štúr's Slovak language, so-called Hodža-Hattala reform, in which he introduced the etymological principle to the Slovak language.
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James Blish
1921 - 1975 (54 years)
James Benjamin Blish was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is best known for his Cities in Flight novels and his series of Star Trek novelizations written with his wife, J. A. Lawrence. His novel A Case of Conscience won the Hugo Award. He is credited with creating the term "gas giant" to refer to large planetary bodies.
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Mei Lanfang
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Mei Lan , better known by his stage name Mei Lanfang, was a notable Peking opera artist in modern Chinese theater. Mei was known as "Queen of Peking Opera". Mei was exclusively known for his female lead roles and particularly his "verdant-robed girls" , young or middle-aged women of grace and refinement. He was considered one of the "Four Great Dan", along with Shang Xiaoyun, Cheng Yanqiu, and Xun Huisheng.
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Gerardus Vossius
1577 - 1649 (72 years)
Gerrit Janszoon Vos , often known by his Latin name Gerardus Vossius, was a Dutch classical scholar and theologian. Life He was the son of Johannes Vos, a Protestant from the Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the Electorate of the Palatinate and briefly became pastor in the village near Heidelberg where Gerardus was born, before friction with the strict Lutherans of the Palatinate caused him to settle the following year at the University of Leiden as student of theology, and finally became pastor at Dordrecht, where he died in 1585. Here in Dordrecht the son received his education,...
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Dhondo Keshav Karve
1858 - 1962 (104 years)
Dhondo Keshav Karve , popularly known as Maharshi Karve, was a social reformer in India in the field of women's welfare. He advocated widow remarriage and he himself married a widow. Karve was a pioneer in promoting widows' education. He founded the first women's university in India, the SNDT Women's University in 1916. The Government of India awarded him with the highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna, in 1958, the year of his 100th birthday. He organized a conference against the practice of devdasi. He started 'Anath balikashram' an orphanage for girls. His intention was to give education to all women and make them stand on their own feet.
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Leonard Robert Palmer
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
Leonard Robert Palmer was author and Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford from 1952 to 1971. He was also a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Palmer made some significant contributions to the study of Classical languages, and in the area of historical linguistics.
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Guido of Arezzo
992 - 1050 (58 years)
Guido of Arezzo was an Italian music theorist and pedagogue of High medieval music. A Benedictine monk, he is regarded as the inventor—or by some, developer—of the modern staff notation that had a massive influence on the development of Western musical notation and practice. Perhaps the most significant European writer on music between Boethius and Johannes Tinctoris, after the former's De institutione musica, Guido's Micrologus was the most widely distributed medieval treatise on music.
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James Mason
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
James Neville Mason was an English actor. He achieved considerable success in British cinema before becoming a star in Hollywood. He was the top box-office attraction in the UK in 1944 and 1945; his British films included The Seventh Veil and The Wicked Lady . He starred in Odd Man Out , the first recipient of the BAFTA Award for Best British Film.
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Marcel L'Herbier
1888 - 1979 (91 years)
Marcel L'Herbier was a French filmmaker who achieved prominence as an avant-garde theorist and imaginative practitioner with a series of silent films in the 1920s. His career as a director continued until the 1950s and he made more than 40 feature films in total. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked on cultural programmes for French television. He also fulfilled many administrative roles in the French film industry, and he was the founder and the first President of the French film school Institut des hautes études cinématographiques .
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Josef Jungmann
1773 - 1847 (74 years)
Josef Jungmann was a Czech poet and linguist, and a leading figure of the Czech National Revival. Together with Josef Dobrovský, he is considered to be a creator of the modern Czech language. The literary award for the best translation into Czech is named after him.
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Modest Mussorgsky
1839 - 1881 (42 years)
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was a Russian composer, one of the group known as "The Five". He was an innovator of Russian music in the Romantic period. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music.
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Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
1838 - 1894 (56 years)
<noinclude> </noinclude> Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay CIE was an Indian novelist, poet, essayist and journalist. He was the author of the 1882 Bengali language novel Anandamath, which is one of the landmarks of modern Bengali and Indian literature. He was the composer of Vande Mataram, written in highly sanskritized Bengali, personifying Bengal as a mother goddess and inspiring activists during the Indian Independence Movement. Chattopadhayay wrote fourteen novels and many serious, serio-comic, satirical, scientific and critical treatises in Bengali. He is known as Sahitya Samrat in Ben...
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Kurt Weill
1900 - 1950 (50 years)
Kurt Julian Weill was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall and a number of works on Jewish themes. He became a United States ci...
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Albert Schweitzer
1875 - 1965 (90 years)
Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer was an Alsatian polymath. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran minister, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of justification by faith as secondary.
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Vincenzo Bellini
1801 - 1835 (34 years)
Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini was an Italian opera composer, who was known for his long-flowing melodic lines for which he was named "the Swan of Catania". Many years later, in 1898, Giuseppe Verdi "praised the broad curves of Bellini's melody: 'there are extremely long melodies as no-one else had ever made before'."
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Hanya Holm
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Hanya Holm is known as one of the "Big Four" founders of American modern dance. She was a dancer, choreographer, and above all, a dance educator. Early life, connection with Mary Wigman Born as Johanna Eckert on 3 March 1893 in Worms, Rhineland-Palatinate, German Empire. Holm was drawn to music and drama at an early age, she attended the Dalcroze Institute of Applied Rhythm in Frankfurt, studying under Emile Jaques-Dalcroze throughout her childhood and young adult life.
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Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
1710 - 1736 (26 years)
Giovanni Battista Draghi , usually referred to as Giovanni Battista Pergolesi , was an Italian Baroque composer, violinist, and organist, leading exponent of the Baroque; he is considered one of the greatest Italian musicians of the first half of the 18th century and one of the most important representatives of the Neapolitan school.
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Jakob Jud
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Jakob Jud [ju:t] was a Swiss Romance linguist . From 1922 to 1950 he taught classes in Romance philology and Old French literature at the University of Zürich. With Karl Jaberg, he was the author of Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz . In 1936, with Arnald Steiger, he founded the magazine Vox Romanica.
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Otto Behaghel
1854 - 1936 (82 years)
Otto Behaghel was a germanist and professor in Heidelberg, Basel, and Gießen. He added theoretical contributions to the German and Middle High German language. He formulated Behaghel's laws. His work is still important in Theme and rheme research.
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Madeleine Carroll
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Edith Madeleine Carroll was an English actress, popular both in Britain and America in the 1930s and 1940s. At the peak of her success in 1938, she was the world's highest-paid actress. Carroll is remembered for starring in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps where she originated the "ice cold blonde" role in Hitchcock films. The director stated, "how very well Madeleine fitted into the part. I had heard a lot about her as a tall, cold, blonde beauty. After meeting her, I made up my mind to present her to the public as her natural self". She is also noted for largely abandoning her acting career...
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David W. Maurer
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
David Warren Maurer was a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville from 1937 to 1972. He was the writer of numerous studies of the language of the American underworld. Biography Maurer received a doctorate from the Ohio State University in Comparative Literature in 1935. He spent much of his academic career studying the language of criminals, drug addicts, and other marginal subcultures.
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Emmanuel Chabrier
1841 - 1894 (53 years)
Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier was a French Romantic composer and pianist. His bourgeois family did not approve of a musical career for him, and he studied law in Paris and then worked as a civil servant until the age of thirty-nine while immersing himself in the modernist artistic life of the French capital and composing in his spare time. From 1880 until his final illness he was a full-time composer.
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Georg Wenker
1852 - 1911 (59 years)
Georg Wenker was a German linguist who began documenting German dialect geography during the late nineteenth century. He is considered a pioneer in this field and contributed several groundbreaking publications, most notably, the Deutscher Sprachatlas.
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Ted Koehler
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Ted L. Koehler was an American lyricist. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. Life and career Koehler was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C. He started out as a photo-engraver, but was attracted to the music business, where he started out as a theater pianist for silent films.
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Niccolò Paganini
1782 - 1840 (58 years)
Niccolò Paganini was an Italian violinist and composer. He was the most celebrated violin virtuoso of his time, and left his mark as one of the pillars of modern violin technique. His 24 Caprices for Solo Violin Op. 1 are among the best known of his compositions and have served as an inspiration for many prominent composers.
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Trevor Howard
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Trevor Wallace Howard-Smith was an English stage, film, and television actor. After varied work in the theatre, he achieved star status with his role in the film Brief Encounter , followed by The Third Man .
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Hans Marchand
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Hans Marchand was a German linguist. He studied Romance languages, English and Latin, and after fleeing Germany during the Third Reich was a lecturer of linguistics at Istanbul, Yale University, and Bard College. From 1957 to 1973 he was a professor at the University of Tübingen.
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Solomon Birnbaum
1891 - 1989 (98 years)
Solomon Asher Birnbaum, also Salomo Birnbaum was a Yiddish linguist and Hebrew palaeographer. Biography Birnbaum , born in Vienna, was the oldest son of Nathan Birnbaum and Rosa Korngut. He was an Austrian Jew of West Galician descent.
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Raoul Walsh
1887 - 1980 (93 years)
Raoul Walsh was an American film director, actor, founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , and the brother of silent screen actor George Walsh. He was known for portraying John Wilkes Booth in the silent film The Birth of a Nation and for directing such films as the widescreen epic The Big Trail starring John Wayne in his first leading role, The Roaring Twenties starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, High Sierra starring Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart, and White Heat starring James Cagney and Edmond O'Brien. He directed his last film in 1964. His work has b...
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Zainul Abedin
1914 - 1976 (62 years)
Zainul Abedin , also known as Shilpacharya was a prominent Bangladeshi painter. He became well known in 1944 through his series of paintings depicting some of the great famines in Bengal during its British colonial period. After the Partition of Indian subcontinent he moved to East Pakistan . In 1948, he helped to establish the Institute of Arts and Crafts at the University of Dhaka. The Indian Express has described him as a legendary Bangladeshi painter and activist. Like many of his contemporaries, his paintings on the Bengal famine of 1943 are viewed as his most characteristic works. His ...
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Théodore Dubois
1837 - 1924 (87 years)
Clément François Théodore Dubois was a French Romantic composer, organist, and music teacher. After study at the Paris Conservatoire, Dubois won France's premier musical prize, the Prix de Rome in 1861. He became an organist and choirmaster at several well-known churches in Paris, and at the same time was a professor in the Conservatoire, teaching harmony from 1871 to 1891 and composition from 1891 to 1896, when he succeeded Ambroise Thomas as the Conservatoire's director. He continued his predecessor's strictly conservative curriculum and was forced to retire early after a scandal erupted ov...
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Hank Williams
1923 - 1953 (30 years)
Hiram "Hank" Williams was an American singer-songwriter. He is regarded as one of the most significant and influential American singers and songwriters of the 20th century. Williams recorded 55 singles that reached the top 10 of the Billboard Country & Western Best Sellers chart, five of which were released posthumously, and 12 of which reached No.1.
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Andrei Tarkovsky
1932 - 1986 (54 years)
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky was a Russian film director and screenwriter. Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential directors in cinema history, Tarkovsky's films explore spiritual and metaphysical themes, and are noted for their slow pacing and long takes, dreamlike visual imagery, and preoccupation with nature and memory.
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