title: Color blindness

text: In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration requires that pilots be tested for normal color vision as part of their medical clearance in order to obtain the required medical certificate, a prerequisite to obtaining a pilot's certification. If testing reveals color blindness, the applicant may be issued a license with restrictions, such as no night flying and no flying by color signals—such a restriction effectively prevents a pilot from holding certain flying occupations, such as that of an airline pilot, although commercial pilot certification is still possible, and there are a few flying occupations that do not require night flight and thus are still available to those with restrictions due to color blindness (e.g., agricultural aviation). The government allows several types of tests, including medical standard tests ("e.g.," the Ishihara, Dvorine, and others) and specialized tests oriented specifically to the needs of aviation. If an applicant fails the standard tests, they will receive a restriction on their medical certificate that states: "Not valid for night flying or by color signal control". They may apply to the FAA to take a specialized test, administered by the FAA. Typically, this test is the "color vision light gun test". For this test an FAA inspector will meet the pilot at an airport with an operating control tower. The color signal light gun will be shone at the pilot from the tower, and they must identify the color. If they pass they may be issued a waiver, which states that the color vision test is no longer required during medical examinations. They will then receive a new medical certificate with the restriction removed. This was once a Statement of Demonstrated Ability (SODA), but the SODA was dropped, and converted to a simple waiver (letter) early in the 2000s.


title: Color blindness

text: Research published in 2009 carried out by the City University of London's Applied Vision Research Centre, sponsored by the UK's Civil Aviation Authority and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, has established a more accurate assessment of color deficiencies in pilot applicants' red/green and yellow–blue color range which could lead to a 35% reduction in the number of prospective pilots who fail to meet the minimum medical threshold.


title: Michael Angarano

text: Michael Anthony Angarano (born December 3, 1987) is an American actor. He became known for his roles in the film "Music of the Heart" (1999) and the television series "Cover Me" (2000–2001), as well as for playing a recurring role as Elliott in the sitcom "Will & Grace". Since then he has starred in a number of films including "Sky High" (2005), "The Forbidden Kingdom" (2008), "Haywire" (2011), "The English Teacher" (2013), and "Sun Dogs" (2017). He has also appeared in the television series "I'm Dying Up Here" (2017–2018) and "This Is Us". The latter earned him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination as an Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series in 2019.


title: Michael Angarano

text: Angarano was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Michael and Doreen Angarano; he has two sisters and a younger brother. He is of Italian descent.


title: Michael Angarano

text: His family owns and operates the dance studio Reflections in Dance in Canoga Park, California. Angarano graduated from Crespi Carmelite High School.


title: Michael Angarano

text: In the late 1990s, Angarano was one of the finalists for the role of young Anakin Skywalker in "", but lost to Jake Lloyd.


title: Michael Angarano

text: Angarano played the 11-year-old version of William Miller in Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical film "Almost Famous" in 2000.


title: Michael Angarano

text: In 2000, 12-year-old Angarano acted in "". The following year, he landed his first major film role in "Little Secrets", opposite Evan Rachel Wood and David Gallagher. Three years later, he starred in the Nickelodeon TV-movie "Maniac Magee". He played the lead role in 2005's "Sky High" alongside Kelly Preston, Kurt Russell, Danielle Panabaker, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Other film roles include parts in "The Bondage", "Black Irish", "Man in the Chair", "Snow Angels", "The Final Season", "One Last Thing...", "The Forbidden Kingdom" alongside Jackie Chan and Jet Li, "Ceremony", "The Brass Teapot", and "Red State".


title: Michael Angarano

text: Angarano did not study martial arts before starring in "The Forbidden Kingdom" with Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Once cast he studied in China for eight hours a day for two weeks with action choreographer Woo-Ping Yuen. Over the seven months of shooting his skills and confidence grew. Angarano's fight scenes were filmed during the last 35 days of shooting.


title: Michael Angarano

text: On television, from 2001 to 2006, he had a recurring role on "Will & Grace" as Elliott, the son of Jack McFarland, a role he reprised in an episode of the show's 2017 reboot. In 2007, he appeared in four episodes of the show "24" as Scott Wallace, a teenager taken hostage by a terrorist. From 2014 to 2015, he played Dr. Bertram "Bertie" Chickering, Jr. on Cinemax's period drama "The Knick". Angarano has also played Eddie Zeidel on the Showtime series "I'm Dying Up Here".


title: Michael Angarano

text: From 2005 to early 2009, Angarano was in a relationship with American actress Kristen Stewart. He then dated English actress Juno Temple from 2013 to 2016.


title: Michael Angarano

text: In September 2019, he confirmed his relationship with American actress Maya Erskine. On November 2, 2020, the couple revealed that they were engaged and expecting a child. Their son, Leon Frederick, was born in 2021.


title: Matt Damon filmography

text: Matt Damon is an American actor, producer and screenwriter. After his film debut "Mystic Pizza", he began acting in supporting roles. His first film in a leading role was in the legal film "The Rainmaker". He had a breakout role for the psychological film "Good Will Hunting", in which he co-wrote with Ben Affleck. They won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Damon was nominated for Best Actor. He starred in the commercially successful films "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley". Damon and Sean Bailey worked on the television series "Project Greenlight", helping newcomers make their first film. He is an executive producer for a number of projects directed by winners of the series. Damon took on starring roles in two lucrative film franchises. He played a con man in "Ocean's Trilogy" and played the titular spy Jason Bourne in four films of the "Bourne" series. Damon starred with Casey Affleck in the drama film "Gerry". He played an energy analyst in the thriller film "Syriana" and starred in the Academy Award winning film "The Departed". He played the rugby player Francois Pienaar in the sports film "Invictus" and was nominated for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He continued gaining praise for collaborations with Soderbergh for the films, "The Informant!" and "Behind the Candelabra". In the former, he played the whistleblower and in the latter, he played the disgruntled lover of Liberace, for which he received an Emmy Award nomination.


title: Matt Damon filmography

text: Damon launched Pearl Street Films, which made its first film "Promised Land". His commercial success in the 2010s came with the western film "True Grit", and the science fiction films "Elysium" and "The Martian". In the latter, which earned over $630 million to become his highest-grossing release, Damon played a botanist stranded on Mars, a role for which he received an Oscar nomination and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. With box office receipts of over $3 billion in North America, Damon ranks among Hollywood's most commercially successful actors.


title: Boney Kapoor

text: Achal Surinder "Boney" Kapoor (born 11 November 1955) is an Indian producer primarily associated with Hindi cinema in addition to Tamil and Telugu cinema.


title: Boney Kapoor

text: Kapoor was born as Achal Surinder Kapoor in 1955, the son of Surinder Kapoor who was a Bollywood film producer, and Nirmal Kapoor. His younger brothers Anil and Sanjay are both actors and producers.


title: Boney Kapoor

text: Kapoor started his career working under legends like Shakti Samanta. The most famous film produced by him remains the Shekhar Kapur directed sci-fi film "Mr India" starring his brother Anil Kapoor and his future wife Sridevi. It was the second biggest hit of 1987 and remains a cult classic in India. The film was known for several of its lines and songs, including Sridevi's "Miss Hawa Hawaii" performance and Amrish Puri's quote "Mogambo khush hua" (Mogambo is satisfied), which is one of the most famous quotes of Bollywood and has become synonymous with Puri.


title: Boney Kapoor

text: Laxmikant–Pyarelal's music performed well too, especially the song "Hawa Hawaii" which is very popular till today. "Mr India" has often been featured in lists of top Bollywood films. "Indiatimes Movies" ranks the movie amongst the Top 25 Must See Bollywood Films. This was the last film that the duo Salim-Javed wrote together. They had split up earlier in 1982, but came back for one last film. It was remade in Tamil as "En Rathathin Rathame", starring K. Bhagyaraj. in Kannada as "Jai Karnataka", starring Ambareesh. On the centenary of Indian cinema, "Mr. India" was declared one of the 100 Greatest Indian Films of All Time. Described by Rediff as "one of the most iconic films of its time", it became one of the highest grossing hits of 1987. and also found a place in Hindustan Times list of 'Top 10 Patriotic Films of Hindi Cinema'.


title: Boney Kapoor

text: His other early productions include "Hum Paanch" which played a key role in establishing actors like Mithun Chakraborty and Amrish Puri in Bollywood. Kapoor also launched many big stars of the Hindi film industry. His production "Woh Saat Din" launched brother Anil Kapoor, "Prem" launched younger brother Sanjay Kapoor and Tabu, and "Koi Mere Dil Se Poochhe" launched actress Esha Deol. He produced one of the most expensive films in the history of Hindi cinema: "Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja" in 1993. In 1997, he produced the box office hit "Judaai" starring Sridevi and Anil together yet again with Urmila Matondkar.


title: Boney Kapoor

text: Kapoor was managing brother Anil's career well until 1999 and in 2000 he produced "Pukar" starring Anil, Madhuri Dixit, Namrata Shirodkar, Danny Denzongpa and Om Puri. The film was critically acclaimed and a moderate success at the box office. It won two National Film Awards, including the Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration and the National Film Award for Best Actor for Anil Kapoor's performance.


title: Boney Kapoor

text: In 2002, he produced "Company" directed by Ram Gopal Varma starring Ajay Devgan, Mohanlal, Manisha Koirala, Vivek Oberoi, and Antara Mali. It is a fictional exposé of the Mumbai underworld, loosely based on the Indian mafia organisation D-Company, known to be run by Dawood Ibrahim. The film received positive reviews from critics as well as audience and won six out of the eleven awards it was nominated for at the Filmfare Awards. The film received critical acclaim at the 2004 Austin Film Festival and New York Asian Film Festival.


title: Boney Kapoor

text: It is the second film in the "Gangster" series and a sequel to the film "Satya". It was followed by a sequel, "D". Film critic Rajeev Masand has labelled it (along with its prequel "Satya") one of the "most influential movies of the past ten years." "Company" marked the introduction of a new genre of film making, a variation of film noir that has been called "Mumbai noir".


title: Boney Kapoor

text: His 2004 film "Run" starring Abhishek Bachchan was a box office failure but has since achieved a cult status for its comedy scenes, especially the "Kauwa Biryani" scene starring Vijay Raaz. Following this, he produced the comedy film "No Entry" that became Bollywood's biggest hit of 2005. It gained a lot of popularity grossing INR .


title: Boney Kapoor

text: In 2009, Kapoor produced "Wanted" starring Salman Khan. The film broke many records at the box office upon release, due to Khan's comeback. "Wanted" was the second highest-grossing Bollywood film of 2009. It had an excellent opening, grossing Rs. 440 million in the first week. It shattered records in Pakistan, grossing over Rs. 1750 million in its first weekend, which was a record for any Indian film. It grossed Rs. 1012.5 million in India and Rs. 260.6 million overseas.


title: Boney Kapoor

text: He acquired the Tamil and Telugu remake rights of 2016 Hindi film "Pink." He produced the Tamil version of the film in 2019 as "Nerkonda Paarvai," which became a critical and commercial success. Later in 2021, he produced the Telugu version of the film along with Dil Raju of Sri Venkateswara Creations as "Vakeel Saab" starring Pawan Kalyan, Anjali, Nivetha Thomas and Ananya Nagalla in lead roles. The film is the highest opener in India post the COVID-19 pandemic, netting over ₹38 crore on its first day. Both the films are his debut into Tamil and Telugu cinema respectively.


title: Boney Kapoor

text: Kapoor was married to Mona Shourie from 1983 to 1996 and the couple have two children, Arjun Kapoor (born 1985) and Anshula (born in 1990). Arjun made his acting debut in the 2012 movie "Ishaqzaade" while Anshula graduated from Barnard College.


title: Boney Kapoor

text: Kapoor married Indian actress Sridevi on 2 June 1996. The couple had two daughters, Janhvi Kapoor (born 6 March 1997) and Khushi Kapoor (born 5 November 2000). On 24 February 2018, Sridevi died in Dubai after drowning in her hotel bath tub. The Kapoor family of Prithviraj Kapoor are also his distant relatives as Prithviraj was Surinder's cousin.


title: Apex Legends

text: Apex Legends is a free-to-play battle royale-hero shooter game developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts. It was released for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One in February 2019, for Nintendo Switch in March 2021, and for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in March 2022. A mobile version of the game designed for touchscreens titled "Apex Legends Mobile" was released in May 2022 on Android and iOS. The game supports cross-platform play, excluding the aforementioned mobile platforms.


title: Apex Legends

text: Before the match, players form into two- or three-player squads, and select from pre-designed characters with distinctive abilities, known as "Legends". The game has two gameplay modes. In "Battle Royale", up to 20 three-person squads or 30 two-person duos land on an island and search for weapons and supplies before attempting to defeat all other players in combat. The available play area on the island shrinks over time, forcing players to keep moving or else find themselves outside the play area which can be fatal. The final team alive wins the round. In "Arenas""," players form into three-player squads and fight against another squad in a 3v3 team deathmatch over a series of rounds to determine the winner of the match. Teams win when their team has at least 3 points and is 2 points ahead.


title: Apex Legends

text: "Apex Legends" is set in the same science fiction universe as Respawn Entertainment's "Titanfall" series, with several characters from the "Titanfall" series appearing either as minor characters or playable Legends. Work on the game began around late 2016, though the project remained a secret right up until its launch. The game's release in 2019 came as a surprise, as until that point it had been assumed that Respawn Entertainment was working on a third installment to the "Titanfall" franchise, the studio's previous major game. "Apex Legends" received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised its gameplay, progression system, and fusion of elements from various genres. Some considered it a worthy competitor to other battle royale games. "Apex Legends" surpassed 25 million players by the end of its first week, and 50 million within its first month. By April 2021, it had approximately 100 million players making it one of the most played video games of all time by player count.


title: Apex Legends

text: "Apex Legends" is an online multiplayer battle royale game featuring squads of three players using pre-made characters with distinctive abilities, called "Legends", similar to those of hero shooters. Alternate modes have been introduced allowing for single and for two-player squads since the game's release. The game is free-to-play and monetized through microtransactions and loot boxes, which allow the player to spend both real money and in-game currency on cosmetic items, such as outfits for the Legends and new colors for weapons.


title: Apex Legends

text: Each match generally features twenty teams of three-player squads. Players can join friends in a squad or can be matched randomly with other players. Before the match, each player on the squad selects one of the 21 playable characters (as of season 13), with the exception that no character may be selected more than once by a squad. Each character in the squad has a unique design, personality, and abilities that provide different playstyles to the team. All teams are then placed on an aircraft that passes over the game map. One player in each squad is the jumpmaster, selecting when the squad should skydive out of the aircraft and where to land with the concurrence of the other squad members. However, players are free to deviate from the squad's path.


title: Apex Legends

text: Once on the ground, the squad can scavenge for weapons, armor, and other equipment that is scattered around buildings, or in crates randomly distributed around the map, while keeping an eye out for other squads. "Apex Legends" includes a nonverbal communication "ping system" which allows players to use their game controller to communicate to their squad certain directions, weapon locations, enemies, and suggested strategies. While the game offers movement options similar to other shooters, it includes some of the gameplay features of previous "Titanfall" games, such as the ability to climb over short walls, slide down inclined surfaces, and use zip-lines to traverse an area quickly.


title: Apex Legends

text: Over time, the game's safe zone will reduce in size around a randomly-selected point on the map; players outside the safe zone take damage and may die if they do not reach the safe zone in time. This also confines squads to smaller spaces to force encounters. The last squad with any members left alive is crowned the "Apex Champions" of that match. Players who become knocked down in the course of a game can be revived by their squadmates. Should a player be killed completely, they can still be resurrected if their team member(s) collect their respawn banner, which appears at the place where they died, and bring it to one of several beacons on the island. The banner, however, must be collected within a time limit, before expiring and fully eliminating the player.


title: Apex Legends

text: Season 9 introduced a new permanent mode named "Arena". In this mode, players form into three-player squads and fight against another squad in a 3v3 team deathmatch over a series of rounds to determine the winner of the match. Teams win when their team has at least 3 points and is 2 points ahead. Additionally, if a game should drag on to round 9 (where both teams have 4 points) a final sudden death round begins. Respawn stated this scoring system "prevents total blowout games from dragging on for too long" and also "lets more competitive games keep the heat going for longer". Rather than skydiving onto the map and gathering equipment like in the battle royale mode, players spawn in a "shop" where they can purchase equipment and charges of their Legend's abilities using materials earned in the previous rounds to prepare for the next fight. This variation of the game borrows mechanics from other shooters such as Counter Strike and Valorant. The mode is the first permanent deviation away from the battle royale format.


title: Apex Legends

text: Each new season is intended to bring with it the release of a new playable character, usually new weapons and purchasable cosmetic items.


title: Apex Legends

text: The game's first season started on March 19, 2019. Associated with seasons are time-limited battle passes that reward players with new cosmetic items, should they complete in-game challenges during the season. Alongside new cosmetic items, seasons can also bring changes to the map and additional gameplay elements.


title: Apex Legends

text: These events offer unique, limited-time cosmetics themed to the event (for example, in the case of the Holo-Day Bash, Christmas-themed outfits) that can be earned in-game. Events also provide unique limited-time game modes (such as shotguns and snipers only). Some events also introduced changes to the current season map with a new point of interest (known as a "Town Takeover"), which is themed around one of the legends.


title: Apex Legends

text: In addition to these major events, there are occasional minor events which only introduce cosmetics available to purchase (such as "Summer of Plunder" and "Arena Flash Events" which ran from season 9 through 10 and had 6 events occur.), or limited-time game modes (without limited-time collectible items), such as the Battle Armor mode (April 28, 2020 to May 12, 2020).


title: Apex Legends

text: "Apex Legends" has a diverse cast of 23 characters. Many of the character designs are based on "Titanfall".


title: Apex Legends

text: Developer Respawn Entertainment had previously developed "Titanfall" (2014) and its sequel "Titanfall 2" (2016), both of which were published by Electronic Arts (EA) who eventually acquired Respawn Entertainment in 2017.


title: Apex Legends

text: According to design director Mackey McCandlish, initial design on "Apex Legends" started before "Titanfall 2" had shipped in 2016 and as of 2018 the entire "Titanfall" team at Respawn Entertainment was working on the project; however, executive producer Drew McCoy stated that work on the game did not begin until the spring of 2017. He also confirmed that the game had approximately 115 developers working on it, making it the studio's most labor-intensive project. "Titanfall 2", by way of comparison, had around 85 developers.


title: Apex Legends

text: According to McCoy, the studio was not sure what their next game would be after completing the post-release support for "Titanfall 2", though they knew they wanted to keep making "Titanfall" games. As with the development of "Titanfall 2", the studio broke into several small teams to create "action blocks", small game prototypes that showcase a gameplay element, a weapon, or similar feature of a game that would fit into a "Titanfall" sequel. One such "action block" was inspired by the success of the battle royale game genre led by "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds"; this prototype, which applied gameplay mechanics of previous "Titanfall" games in a battle royale format, was considered very successful and the studio decided to expand this model. The designers decided that having the pilotable Titans (large mecha) from their previous games would not work well in a battle-royale setting and instead focused on creating strong character classes which felt appropriate for the "Titanfall" franchise. They also found that some maneuverability features of prior "Titanfall" titles, such as wall-running, would make gameplay too challenging in a battle royale format, as identifying the direction of threats would be too difficult.


title: Apex Legends

text: Respawn Entertainment CEO Vince Zampella told VentureBeat that "Apex Legends", as a live-service and free-to-play battle-royale game, was a new challenge for the studio and represented a new way for them of developing games. Their design philosophy was focused on "chasing the fun" and designing all the mechanics around team-based play, rather than solo play. The final decision on major design factors, such as the size of the teams, the number of teams and the size of the map, were all based on what felt "most fun" to the developers and were strongly guided by "gut feeling".


title: Apex Legends

text: Design director Mackey McCandlish also stated that with "Apex Legends", they were looking to challenge the conventions of the still relatively young battle-royale genre and to add their studio's unique touch to that class of games. They felt that the choice of three-man squads and a limit of 20 teams gave players on average a greater chance to win and also felt more in line with the type of intimate gameplay they were hoping to achieve. McCandlish claimed that the studio felt the need to create a "defensible space" in the battle-royale mode which could not be easily imitated and that the communication system, the three-man squads, and the smaller playing area were all aligned with this goal.


title: Apex Legends

text: As part of the development process, the game underwent extensive play-testing to ensure that all elements felt fun and balanced. Collectively the developers spent 100 to 200 hours a day trying out the game, a process which executive producer Drew McCoy called "probably the most important part of development". To refine the game's non-verbal communication system, the studio play-tested the game for a month without the use of voice chat and applied fake names to the play-testers to predict how most players would experience the game.


title: Apex Legends

text: With the game mostly completed, Respawn's director of brand marketing, Arturo Castro, began working on how the studio would name and market it. Castro recognized that the game featured many elements which players would expect from a "Titanfall" franchise game, but lacked core elements such as Titans, Pilots and a single-player experience. Additionally, it had already been reported that Respawn was working on "Titanfall 3" from a source at the studio. Respawn therefore decided that attempting to market the game as part of the "Titanfall" series would have been difficult and would risk alienating "Titanfall" fans. They, therefore, opted to treat the game as a new intellectual property (IP). Respawn were also concerned that as they at that time had recently been acquired by EA, players would think that EA had forced them to make a battle royale game. McCoy affirmed that they had to convince Electronic Arts to allow them to make this game: ""we" decided to make this game. Not to be throwing EA under the bus, but this wasn't the game they were expecting. I had to go to executives, show it to them, and explain it and...not convince but more, 'Hey, trust us! This is the thing you want out of us.' [...] This is a game where we had to say, 'This is what we want to do. Help us get there.'"


title: Apex Legends

text: Concerned that a standard six-month marketing campaign for the game would have generated negative publicity from disgruntled "Titanfall" fans, Castro claims they eventually took inspiration from musical artist Beyoncé whose release of her self-titled album came as a surprise to fans—a strategy which proved financially successful. Wanting to generate some buzz about this new product before its release, the studio secretly arranged for about 100 social media influencers to travel to their studio to try the game and then instructed them to "tease" news of it on their social media accounts during halftime of the Super Bowl LIII, the day before "Apex Legends" formal release. Respawn CEO Vince Zampella felt the approach was "gross", according to Castro, as he found it reminiscent of the infamous Fyre Festival "hype" which later turned out to be a fraudulent event. However, as "Apex Legends" was already ready for release at this point, Castro felt the approach was an appropriate marketing strategy. Because of the game's performance in terms of player-count and viewership on streaming services, Castro felt vindicated in this decision. This approach was uncharacteristic of any prior EA title.


title: Apex Legends

text: The game is built using a modified version of Source engine; Source had previously been used for "Titanfall 2", however for "Apex Legends" several necessary adjustments to allow for the increased draw distances and the large game map were made. "Apex Legends" is believed to be pushing at the technological limits of its game engine and as a result, the game compromises on dynamic display resolution, with the quality of the image and frame rate suffering particularly on console versions and on lower-end PC devices.


title: Apex Legends

text: Prior to launch, McCoy confirmed there were plans to implement cross-platform play to the game in the future, though claimed that game progression and in-game purchases cannot be transferred across systems due to hardware limitations. McCoy has also expressed the desire to eventually bring "Apex Legends" to iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch.


title: Apex Legends

text: According to anonymous reports, Tencent Games is working with Electronic Arts to bring "Apex Legends" to China, as partnering with a local Chinese firm is a requirement for Western media companies wishing to make their products legally available in the country. In January 2020, EA confirmed to investors that it was working with a local partner in order to bring the game to PC in China, though it did not mention the partner by name.


title: Apex Legends

text: Respawn established a new Vancouver, British Columbia, studio, within the EA Vancouver campus, dedicated to supporting "Apex Legends" in May 2020.


title: Apex Legends

text: As part of the June 2020 EA Play presentation, Respawn announced that "Apex Legends" would be brought to the Steam storefront for Windows players, as well as to the Nintendo Switch by late 2020. Further, the game would support cross-platform play across all supported platforms on these releases. Cross-platform play was introduced into the game with the Aftermarket Collection Event. In a blog post by Respawn in late October 2020, it was revealed that the Steam version will launch on November 4, the same day as the launch of season 7. However, the Nintendo Switch version was delayed to March 9, 2021. The Nintendo Switch version of "Apex Legends" was developed by Panic Button, known for their Switch ports of the "DOOM" series and "Rocket League".


title: Apex Legends

text: Electronic Arts also confirmed that mobile launches on iOS and Android were in development in collaboration with a Chinese mobile company. The mobile ports are set to release by the end of 2022. In April 2021, Electronic Arts announced that the mobile version of the game would be titled "Apex Legends Mobile", and would begin beta testing in the coming months. In July 2021, "Apex Legends" was hacked by individuals wishing to draw attention to persistent problems with cheating in the "Titanfall" series that had been unaddressed by Electronic Arts and Respawn. Large banners pointed players of "Apex Legends" to a website outlining their concerns.


title: Apex Legends

text: In February 2022, Respawn announced that a native version of "Apex Legends" for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S was "coming very soon..." and that it would introduce new features specifically for the next generation consoles. These versions were released on March 29, 2022.


title: Apex Legends

text: "Apex Legends Mobile" is set to release on May 17, 2022, for iOS and Android devices. The game is published by Electronic Arts and developed by Chinese company Lightspeed and Quantum Studios, a subsidiary of Tencent and the developer of PUBG Mobile.


title: Apex Legends

text: Shortly after "Apex Legends" launch, it was seen as a potential esport competition, and Respawn had anticipated establishing events once the game had been established. As early as March 2019, various esport team sponsors began to assemble "Apex Legends" teams for these competitions. ESPN launched its EXP program to showcase esports events running alongside other ESPN-managed sporting events. The first such event was the EXP Pro-Am Apex Legends Exhibition, run on July 11, 2019, alongside the 2019 ESPY Awards. An EXP Invitational event with a $150,000 prize pool took place alongside the X Games Minneapolis 2019 from August 1 to 4, 2019. However, as a result of the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings that occurred over that weekend, both ESPN and ABC opted to delay broadcast of the event out of respect for the victims of the shootings.


title: Apex Legends

text: Respawn and EA announced the "Apex Legends" Global Series in December 2019, consisting of several online events and twelve live events during 2020 with a total prize pool. The Global Series follows a similar approach as "Fortnite Battle Royale" by using multiple tiers of events to qualify players. Players will qualify for the Global Series through Online Tournaments. Top players and teams from these events will be invited to either regional Challenger events or to global Premier events, where the winners have a chance for a cash payout and invitations to one of the three major events. Three Major events will be held for one hundred teams to accumulate points in the Global Series to vie for placement in the final Major event as well as part of a prize pool. The fourth Major event had up to sixty teams competing for a portion of a pool.


title: Apex Legends

text: Year 3 of the ALGS began on July 7, 2022, consisting of 40 teams around the world with a total US$2 million prize pool. The first place belongs to Darkzero Esports, with the prize of US$500,000.


title: Apex Legends

text: "Apex Legends" received "generally favorable" reviews for most platforms according to review aggregator Metacritic; the Nintendo Switch version received "mixed or average" reviews. Some publications, including "Destructoid", "Game Informer", "GamesRadar+", and "PC Gamer", called it one of the best takes on the battle royale genre thus far, and a worthy challenger to "Fortnite Battle Royale" dominance of the genre.


title: Apex Legends

text: Critics lauded the combat in "Apex Legends". "Destructoid" referred to the gunplay as the best they had experienced in a battle royale thus far; however, they felt let down that some of the mechanics from the previous "Titanfall" games were not present. Javy Gwaltney of "Game Informer", on the other hand, claimed that the omission of the Titans and other elements from previous Respawn games was not a problem and found the combat to be satisfying and the gunplay powerful. He added that the addition of heroes can make for more exciting combat than in other battle royale games.


title: Apex Legends

text: Reviewers praised the non-verbal communication system in the game (known as the "ping system") with most considering it to be highly innovative. "Polygon"'s Khee Hoon Chan opined that it "rendered voice chat with strangers largely unnecessary", and was emblematic of "Apex Legends" accessibility and astuteness. "Destructoid" likewise enjoyed the mechanic, predicting that it would become the new norm for the video games industry in battle royale games. Rock Paper Shotgun called it the "gold standard for non-verbal communication in games" and noted that, while not an entirely new concept, Respawn Entertainment had refined the idea. While Electronic Arts had received a U.S. patent for the ping system in 2021, the company announced that the ping system patent and four others related to game accessibility would be made available for free to game developers to use without fear of litigation starting in August 2021. IGN awarded the game a 9, summing up the review by saying "Apex Legends is squad-based battle royale done right, complete with cool heroes, a superb communication system, and polished mechanics"


title: Apex Legends

text: "Apex Legends" received critical praise for the perceived diversity of its playable characters. Several characters are LGBTQ, including one non-binary character, though some reviewers felt that the nature of the game did not allow for a narrative which properly highlights this diversity.


title: Apex Legends

text: Eight hours after its launch, "Apex Legends" surpassed one million unique players, and reached 2.5 million unique players within 24 hours. In one week it achieved a total of 25 million players, with over 2 million peak concurrent, and by the end of its first month it reached 50 million players in total.


title: Apex Legends

text: Within the first month of its release, "Apex Legends" made $92 million in revenue across all platforms, the highest amount earned by any free-to-play game during its month of launch.


title: Apex Legends

text: As news and popularity of "Apex Legends" spread, analysts saw the game as something to challenge the dominance of "Fortnite Battle Royale", and by February 8, 2019—four days after the game's release—EA had seen its largest growth in stock value since 2014 on the basis of "Apex Legends" sudden success.


title: Apex Legends

text: Throughout April, the game was estimated to have earned $24 million in revenue, representing 74 percent less than the amount it earned during its first month, as the game failed to sustain the same level of interest generated by its launch.


title: Apex Legends

text: In July 2019, EA told investors that the game had 8 to 10 million players a week and also credited "Apex Legends" with the company's recent upturn in live services earnings as their Q1 2020 financial results exceeded expectations.


title: Apex Legends

text: With the release of season 3 in October 2019, "Apex Legends" reached a playerbase of 70 million people internationally and is believed to have earned $45 million in that month alone.


title: Apex Legends

text: In February 2021, EA's CFO, Blake Jorgensen, confirmed that "Apex Legends" has surpassed $1 billion in revenue.


title: Apex Legends

text: In April 2021, right before the release of the game's 9th season, Respawn announced that "Apex Legends" had reached a playerbase of over 100 million people and was expected to pull in $500 million that year.


title: Apex Legends

text: On August 11, 2022, the game broke its all-time record for number of consecutive players on Steam with 510,286, according to stat-tracking database Steamcharts.


title: Apex Legends

text: With the introduction of the 'Iron Crown' limited-time event in August 2019, the developers released several purchasable in-game cosmetic items. The vast majority of these items could only be acquired through purchasing loot boxes, and the most sought-after item (a cosmetic axe for one of the player characters) could only be purchased at an additional cost after first having obtained 24 other purchasable items. Players and media outlets decried that as a result of this transaction model, the cost of the most sought-after item was approximately $170 (or £130)—a price point which "Forbes" called "hilariously out of touch" and compared negatively to most other major microtransaction models in the industry.


title: Apex Legends

text: This resulted in a negative backlash from the player community and industry journalists, particularly on Reddit, where members of the "Apex Legends" community forum traded insults with developers of the game with the increasingly strong language being used by both parties.


title: Apex Legends

text: As a result, Respawn Entertainment apologized for what they agreed was unfair monetization and promised to allow players the chance to purchase cosmetic items directly (rather than rely on loot boxes), albeit at an increased price. Respawn Entertainment CEO Vince Zampella later apologized for members of the development team "crossing a line with their comments", while also defending that they stood up for themselves against alleged death threats and insults aimed at their family members.


title: Apex Legends

text: Around July 4, 2021, unknown agents appeared to have broken EA and Respawn's server security as to change in-game messages to point to a website that purportedly was trying to "Save Titanfall". The site and messages spoke of the weak security that both "Titanfall" and "Titanfall 2" servers had, leading to the games becoming unplayable due to the number of other hackers using denial of service attacks to bring down the servers. A community-led investigation determined that the owners of the website were directly involved in hacking the "Apex" servers were also behind some of the denial attacks on the "Titanfall" servers as a type of false flag to get Respawn to bring back the cancelled "Titanfall Online" game.


title: Apex Legends

text: The 'Monsters Within' event released on October 12, 2021, as the 2021 Halloween Event. People were upset when it was announced because the event was not launching with the Shadow Royale gamemode, and it was instead only going to be available for the final week of the event. There was also controversy over the way that Respawn sold the event skins, as players could not buy them by themselves. People were also upset because the game was in a state of constant crashes and many game breaking bugs.


title: Alphabet

text: An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units.


title: Alphabet

text: The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Sinaitic script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic. It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula (as the Proto-Sinaitic script), by selecting a small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values of the Canaanite languages. However, Peter T. Daniels distinguishes an abugida, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base letters that diacritics modify to represent vowels (as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts), an abjad, in which letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants (as in the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic), and an alphabet, a set of graphemes that represent both consonants and vowels. In this narrow sense of the word, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was based on the earlier Phoenician alphabet.


title: Alphabet

text: Of the dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular is the Latin alphabet, which was derived from the Greek alphabet, and which is now used by many languages worldwide, often with the addition of extra letters or diacritical marks. While most alphabets have letters composed of lines, there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille.


title: Alphabet

text: Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order. It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of "numbering" ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements.


title: Alphabet

text: The English word "alphabet" came into Middle English from the Late Latin word "alphabetum", which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος ("alphabētos"), it was made from the first two letters, "alpha" (α) and "beta" (β). The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet; "aleph", which also meant "ox", and "bet", which also meant "house".


title: Alphabet

text: The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals, representing syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.


title: Alphabet

text: In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appeared in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai peninsula dated to circa the 15th century BCE, apparently left by Canaanite workers. In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell discovered an earlier version of this first alphabet at Wadi el-Hol. Dating to circa 1800 BCE and showing evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to circa 2000 BCE, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had developed about that time. Based on letter appearances and names, believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. This script had no characters representing vowels. Originally, it probably was a syllabary, with symbols that were not needed being removed. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs, including three that indicate the following vowel invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BCE. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit.


title: Alphabet

text: The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally called "Proto-Canaanite" before c. 1050 BCE. The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram. This script is the parent script of all western alphabets. By the tenth century, two other forms distinguish themselves, Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew script. The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) descended. Vowel-less alphabets are called abjads, currently exemplified in others such as, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution, and some "weak" consonants sometimes being used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable). These letters have a dual function since they can also be used as pure consonants.


title: Alphabet

text: The Proto-Sinaitic script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs, in contrast to the other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The Phoenician script was probably the first phonemic script, and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could write different languages since it recorded words phonemically.


title: Alphabet

text: The script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians. In Greece, they added vowels to the alphabet, giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. It was the first alphabet in which vowels have independent letter forms separate from those of consonants. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels. Vowels are significant in the Greek language. The syllabical Linear B script that was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BCE had 87 symbols, including five vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation that caused many different alphabets to evolve from it.


title: Alphabet

text: The Greek alphabet, in Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula, giving rise to many different alphabets used to write the Italic languages. One of these became the Latin alphabet, which spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire. Even after the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It eventually became used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages) and most of the other languages of western and central Europe.


title: Alphabet

text: Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet have ligatures, such as æ in Danish and Icelandic and Ȣ in Algonquian; borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes; and modified existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified "d". Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, and Italian, which uses the letters "j, k, x, y," and "w" only in foreign words.


title: Alphabet

text: Another notable script is Elder Futhark, believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets. Elder Futhark gave rise to other alphabets known collectively as the Runic alphabets. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from 100 CE to the late Middle Ages being engraved on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions found on bone and wood occasionally appear. These alphabets have since gotten replaced with the Latin alphabet. The exception being for decorative use, where the runes remained in use until the 20th century.


title: Alphabet

text: The Old Hungarian script was the writing system of the Hungarians. It was in use during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system. From the 19th century, it once again became more and more popular.


title: Alphabet

text: The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script. Cyrillic is one of the most widely used modern alphabetic scripts, and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and also for other languages within the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic alphabets include Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian. The Glagolitic alphabet believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by Clement of Ohrid, their disciple. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by Greek and Hebrew.


title: Alphabet

text: Beyond the logographic Chinese writing, many phonetic scripts exist in Asia. The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic alphabet.


title: Alphabet

text: Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia descend from the Brahmi script, believed to be a descendant of Aramaic.


title: Alphabet

text: In Korea, Sejong the Great created the Hangul alphabet Hangul is a unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet, where design of many of the letters comes from a sound's place of articulation (P to look like the widened mouth, L to look like the tongue pulled in); creation of Hangul was planned by the government of the day; and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters, to allow for mixed-script writing (one syllable always takes up one type-space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block).


title: Alphabet

text: Zhuyin (sometimes called "Bopomofo") is a semi-syllabary. It transcribes Mandarin phonetically in the Republic of China. After the later establishment of the People's Republic of China and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, the use of Zhuyin today is limited. However, it is still widely used in Taiwan, where the Republic of China governs. Zhuyin developed from a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Like an alphabet, the phonemes of syllable initials get represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary, the phonemes of the syllable finals are not; each possible final (excluding the medial glide) has its own character, an example being, "luan" written as ㄌㄨㄢ ("l-u-an"). The last symbol ㄢ takes place as the entire final "-an". While Zhuyin is not a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system, for aiding pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and cellphones.


title: Alphabet

text: European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad (as with Urdu and Persian) and sometimes as a complete alphabet (as with Kurdish and Uyghur).


title: Alphabet

text: The term "alphabet" gets used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In a larger sense, an alphabet is a "segmental" script at the phoneme level—that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads, and abugidas. These three differ in how they treat vowels. Abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed. Abugidas are also consonant-based but indicate vowels with diacritics, a systematic graphic modification of the consonants. In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters. The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad. Its successor, Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet), and Hebrew (via Aramaic).


title: Alphabet

text: Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts; true alphabets include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean hangul; and abugidas, used to write Tigrinya, Amharic, Hindi, and Thai. The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are also an abugida rather than a syllabary as their name would imply, because each glyph stands for a consonant and is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel (in a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination gets represented by a separate glyph).


title: Alphabet

text: All three types may be augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic, for example, is basically an abjad but has syllabic letters for (these are the only times that vowels are indicated). Coptic has a letter for . Devanagari is typically an abugida augmented with dedicated letters for initial vowels, though some traditions use अ as a zero consonant as the graphic base for such vowels.


title: Alphabet

text: The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example, Sorani Kurdish is written in the Arabic script, which when used for other languages is an abjad. In Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and whole letters get used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with forced vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the Phagspa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan abugida, but vowel marks are written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short "a" not getting written, as in the Indic abugidas, one could argue that the linear arrangement made this a true alphabet. Ironically, the original source of the term "abugida", namely the Ge'ez abugida now used for Amharic and Tigrinya, has assimilated into their consonant modifications. It is now no longer systematic and must be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic.


title: Alphabet

text: Thus the primary categorisation of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For tonal languages, further classification can be based on their treatment of tone though names do not yet exist to distinguish the various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Such scripts are to tone what abjads are to vowels. Most commonly, tones get indicated with diacritics, which is how vowels get treated in abugidas, which is the case for Vietnamese (a true alphabet) and Thai (an abugida). In Thai, the tone is determined primarily by a consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script, an abugida, vowels get indicated by diacritics. The placing of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone. More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case for Hmong and Zhuang. For many, regardless of whether letters or diacritics get used, the most common tone is not marked, just as the most common vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas. In Zhuyin, not only is one of the tones unmarked; but there is a diacritic to indicate a lack of tone, like the virama of Indic.


title: Alphabet

text: The number of letters in an alphabet can be small. The Book Pahlavi script, an abjad, had only twelve letters at one point and may have had even fewer. Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters (the Hawaiian alphabet claimed to be that small. However, it consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels). While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters got "conflated"—or, the graphic distinctions had gotten lost over time. In later Pahlavi papyri, up to half of the remaining graphic distinctions of these twelve letters were lost, and the script could no longer be read as a sequence of letters at all. Instead, each word had to be learned as a whole—or, they had become logograms as in Egyptian Demotic. Moreover, the spellings of some words were heterograms; that is, those spellings did not reflect the pronunciation of those words in Pahlavi but instead reflected their Aramaic equivalents used as logograms (as English "e. g." 'for example', from Latin "exempli gratia").


title: Alphabet

text: The largest segmental script is probably Devanagari. When written in Devanagari, Vedic Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including the "visarga" mark for final aspiration and special letters for "kš" and "jñ." However, one of the letters is theoretical and not used. The Hindi alphabet must represent both Sanskrit and modern vocabulary, and so has been expanded to 58 with the letters (letters with a dot added) to represent sounds from Persian and English.


title: Alphabet

text: The largest known abjad is Sindhi, with 52 letters. The largest alphabets in the narrow sense include Abkhaz and Kabardian (for Cyrillic), with 62 and 60 letters, respectively, and Slovak (for the Latin script), with 46. However, these scripts either count di- and tri-graphs as separate letters, as Spanish did with "ch" and "ll" until recently, or uses diacritics like Slovak "č".


title: Alphabet

text: The Georgian alphabet is an alphabetic writing system. The modern Georgian alphabet has 33 letters. The original Georgian alphabet had 38 letters, but five letters were removed in the 19th century by Ilia Chavchavadze.


title: Alphabet

text: The Armenian alphabet is an alphabetical writing system used to write the Armenian language. It was created in year 405 A.D. originally contained 36 letters. Two more letters, օ (o) and ֆ (f), were added in the Middle Ages. During the 1920s orthography reform, a new letter և (capital ԵՎ) was added, which was a ligature before ե+ւ. The letter Ւ ւ was discarded and reintroduced as part of a new letter ՈՒ ու (which was a digraph before).


title: Alphabet

text: Syllabaries typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs. Glyphs of logographic systems typically number from the many hundreds into the thousands. Thus a simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script.


title: Alphabet

text: Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters, which is for collation—namely, for the listing words and other items in "alphabetical order".


title: Alphabet

text: The basic ordering of the Latin alphabet (A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z), which derives from the Northwest Semitic "Abgad" order, is already well established. Although, languages using this alphabet have different conventions for their treatment of modified letters (such as the French "é", "à", and "ô") and certain combinations of letters (multigraphs). In French, these are not considered to be additional letters for collation. However, in Icelandic, the accented letters such as "á", "í", and "ö" are considered distinct letters representing different vowel sounds from sounds represented by their unaccented counterparts. In Spanish, "ñ" is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as "á" and "é" are not. The "ll" and "ch" got considered single letters, but in 1994 the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies. The collating order got changed so that "ll" is between "lk" and "lm" in the dictionary and "ch" is between "cg" and "ci", and in 2010 the Real Academia Española changed it to where they are longer letters at all.


title: Alphabet

text: In German, words starting with "sch-" (which spells the German phoneme ) get inserted between words with initial "sca-" and "sci-" (all incidentally loanwords) instead of appearing after the initial "sz", as though it were a single letter. Which contrasts several languages such as Albanian, in which "dh-", "ë-", "gj-", "ll-", "rr-", "th-", "xh-," and "zh-."(All are considered separate letters.) Which all represent phonemes and considered separate single letters. Would follow the letters "d", "e", "g", "l", "n", "r", "t", "x," and "z," respectively, as well as Hungarian and Welsh. Further, German words with an umlaut get collated ignoring the umlaut as per DIN 5007-1—contrary to Turkish that adopted the graphemes ö and ü, and where a word like "tüfek" would come after "tuz", in the dictionary. An exception is the German telephone directory, where umlauts are sorted like "ä"="ae" since names such as "Jäger" also appear with the spelling "Jaeger" and are not distinguished in the spoken language.


title: Alphabet

text: The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with "æ"—"ø"—"å", whereas the Swedish and Finnish ones conventionally put "å"—"ä"—"ö" at the end.


title: Alphabet

text: It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as the Hanuno'o script, are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required. However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets from the fourteenth century BCE preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One, the "ABCDE" order later used in Phoenician, has continued with minor changes in Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Gothic, Cyrillic, and Latin; the other, "HMĦLQ," was used in southern Arabia and is preserved today in Ethiopic. Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years.


title: Alphabet

text: Runic used an unrelated Futhark sequence, which got simplified later on. Arabic uses its sequence, although Arabic retains the traditional abjadi order for numbering.


title: Alphabet

text: The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India uses an unique order based on phonology: The letters get arranged according to how and where the sounds get produced in the mouth. This organization is present in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean hangul, and even Japanese kana, which is not an alphabet.


title: Alphabet

text: The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter got associated with a word that begins with that sound (acrophony), continue to be used to varying degrees in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic.


title: Alphabet

text: Acrophony got abandoned in Latin. It referred to the letters by adding a vowel (usually "e," sometimes "a" or "u") before or after the consonant. With two exceptions were Y and Z, which were borrowed from the Greek alphabet rather than Etruscan. They were known as "Y Graeca" "Greek Y" and "zeta" (from Greek)—this discrepancy was inherited by many European languages, as in the term "zed" for Z in all forms of English, other than American English. Over time names sometimes shifted or were added, as in "double U" for W, or "double V" in French, the English name for Y, and American "zee" for Z. Comparing them in English and French gives a clear reflection of the Great Vowel Shift: A, B, C, and D are pronounced in today's English, but in contemporary French they are . The French names (from which the English names got derived) preserve the qualities of the English vowels before the Great Vowel Shift. By contrast, the names of F, L, M, N, and S () remain the same in both languages because "short" vowels were largely unaffected by the Shift.


title: Alphabet

text: In Cyrillic, originally, acrophony was present using Slavic words. However, this got abandoned in favor of a system similar to Latin.


title: Alphabet

text: When an alphabet is adopted or developed to represent a given language, an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for spelling words, following the principle on which alphabets get based. These rules will map letters of the alphabet to the phonemes of the spoken language. In a perfectly phonemic orthography, there would be consistent one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes so that a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker would always know the pronunciation of a word given its spelling, and vice versa. However, this ideal is usually never achieved in practice. Languages can come close to it, such as Spanish and Finnish. others, such as English, deviate from it to a much larger degree.


title: Alphabet

text: The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system. Writing systems have gotten borrowed for languages they did not design to have in mind. The degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies.


title: Alphabet

text: Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways:


title: Alphabet

text: National languages sometimes elect to address the problem of dialects by associating the alphabet with the national standard. Some national languages like Finnish, Armenian, Turkish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) and Bulgarian have a very regular spelling system with a nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Strictly speaking, these national languages lack a word corresponding to the verb "to spell" (meaning to split a word into its letters), the closest match being a verb meaning to split a word into its syllables. Similarly, the Italian verb corresponding to 'spell (out),' "compitare", is unknown to many Italians because spelling is usually trivial, as Italian spelling is highly phonemic. In standard Spanish, one can tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa, as phonemes sometimes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter gets consistently pronounced. French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, it's rules on pronunciation, though complex, are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.


title: Alphabet

text: At the other extreme are languages such as English, where pronunciations mostly have to be memorized as they do not correspond to the spelling consistently. For English, this is partly because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography got established and because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels. Even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling. Rules like this are usually successful. However, rules to predict spelling from pronunciation have a higher failure rate.


title: Alphabet

text: Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system. For example, Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin-based Turkish alphabet, and when Kazakh changed from an Arabic script to a Cyrillic script due to the Soviet Union's influence, and in 2021, having a transition to the Latin alphabet, just like Turkish. The Cyrillic script used to be official in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan before they all switched to the Latin alphabet, including Uzbekistan that is having a reform of the alphabet to use diacritics on the letters that get marked by apostrophes and the letters that are digraphs.


title: Alphabet

text: The standard system of symbols used by linguists to represent sounds in any language, independently of orthography, is called the International Phonetic Alphabet.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: The city was established in 1894 by the American industrialist Leland Stanford when he founded Stanford University in memory of his son, Leland Stanford Jr. Palo Alto includes portions of Stanford University and borders East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park. At the 2020 census, the population was 68,572. Palo Alto is one of the most expensive cities in the United States in which to live, and its residents are among the most educated in the country. However, it also has a youth suicide rate four times higher than the national average, often attributed to academic pressure.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: As one of the principal cities of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto is headquarters to a number of high-tech companies, including HP, Space Systems/Loral, VMware, Ford Research and Innovation Center, PARC, IDEO, Skype, Houzz, SAP Labs, and Lockheed Martin. Palo Alto has also served as headquarters to several other high-tech companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Logitech, Tesla, Intuit, Pinterest, and PayPal.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Ohlone lived on the San Francisco peninsula; in particular, the Puichon Ohlone lived in the Palo Alto area. The area of modern Palo Alto was first recorded by the 1769 party of Gaspar de Portolá, a 64-man, 200-horse expedition setting out from San Diego to find Monterey Bay. The group trekked past the bay without recognizing it and continued north. When they reached modern-day Pacifica, they ascended Sweeney Ridge and saw the San Francisco Bay on November 2. Portolá descended from Sweeney Ridge southeast down San Andreas Creek to Laguna Creek (now Crystal Springs Reservoir), thence to the San Francisquito Creek watershed, ultimately camping from November 6–11, 1769, by a tall redwood later to be known as El Palo Alto.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: In 1777, Father Junipero Serra established the Mission Santa Clara de Asis, whose northern boundary was San Francisquito Creek and whose lands included modern Palo Alto. The area was under the control of the viceroy of Mexico and ultimately under the control of Spain. On November 29, 1777, Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe (now the city of San Jose a few miles to the south of what was to be Palo Alto) was established by order of the viceroy despite the displeasure of the local mission. The Mexican War of Independence ending in 1821 led to Mexico becoming an independent country, though San Jose did not recognize rule by the new Mexico until May 10, 1825. Mexico proceeded to sell off or grant much of the mission land.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: During the Mexican–American War, the United States seized Alta California in 1846; however, this was not legalized until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on July 4, 1848. Mexican citizens in the area could choose to become United States citizens and their land grants were to be recognized if they chose to do so (though many legal disputes arose over this).


title: Palo Alto, California

text: The land grant, Rancho Rinconada del Arroyo de San Francisquito, of about on the lower reaches of San Francisquito Creek (i.e., parts of modern Menlo Park and northern Palo Alto) was given to Maria Antonia Mesa in 1841. She and her husband Rafael Soto (who had died in 1839) had settled in 1835 near present-day Newell and Middlefield roads and sold supplies. In 1839, their daughter María Luisa Soto (1817–1883) married John Coppinger, who was to be, in 1841, the grantee of Rancho Cañada de Raymundo (in modern San Mateo county). Upon Coppinger's death in 1847, Maria inherited it and later married a visiting boat captain, John Greer. Greer owned a home on the site that is now Town & Country Village on Embarcadero and El Camino Real. Greer Avenue and Court are named for him.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: To the south of the Sotos, the brothers Secundino and Teodoro Robles in 1849 bought Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito from José Peña, the 1841 grantee. The grant covered the area south of Rancho Rinconada del Arroyo de San Francisquito to more or less present-day Mountain View. The grant was bounded on the south by Mariano Castro's Rancho Pastoria de las Borregas grant across San Antonio Road. This later became the Robles Rancho, which constitutes about 80% of Palo Alto and Stanford University today. In 1863, it was whittled down in the courts to . Stories say the grand hacienda was built on the former meager adobe of José Peña near Ferne off San Antonio Road, midway between Middlefield and Alma Street. Their hacienda hosted fiestas and bull fights. It was ruined in the 1906 earthquake and its lumber was used to build a large barn nearby, which was said to have lingered until the early 1950s. On April 10, 1853, , comprising the present-day Barron Park, Matadero Creek and Stanford Business Park, was sold for $2,000 to Elisha Oscar Crosby, who called his new property Mayfield Farm. The name of Mayfield was later attached to the community that started nearby. On September 23, 1856, the Crosby land was transferred to Sarah Wallis to satisfy a debt he owed her. In 1880, Secundino Robles, father to twenty-nine children, still lived just south of Palo Alto, near the location of the present-day San Antonio Shopping Center in Mountain View.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Many of the Spanish names in the Palo Alto area represent the local heritage, descriptive terms, and former residents. Pena Court, Miranda Avenue, which was essentially Foothill Expressway, was the married name of Juana Briones and the name occurs in Courts and Avenues and other street names in Palo Alto and Mountain View in the quadrant where she owned vast areas between Stanford University, Grant Road in Mountain View and west of El Camino Real. Yerba Buena was to her credit. Rinconada was the major Mexican land grant name.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: The township of Mayfield was formed in 1855, around the site of a stagecoach stop and saloon known as "Uncle Jim's Cabin" near the intersection of El Camino Real and today's California Avenue in what is now southern Palo Alto. In October 1863 the San Francisco to San Jose railroad had been built as far as Mayfield and service started between San Francisco and Mayfield (the station is now California Avenue); train service all the way to San Jose started in January 1864. El Camino became Main Street; the northeast-southwest cross streets were named for Civil War heroes, with California Avenue originally being Lincoln Street. The town had its own newspaper by 1869 (the "Mayfield Enterprise", in English and Spanish), incorporated in 1903, and had breweries and a cannery.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: In 1875, French financier Jean Baptiste Paulin Caperon, better known as Peter Coutts, purchased land in Mayfield and four other parcels around three sides of today's College Terrace – more than a thousand acres extending from today's Page Mill Road to Serra Street and from El Camino Real to the foothills. Coutts named his property Ayrshire Farm. His fanciful 50-foot-tall brick tower near Matadero Creek likely marked the south corner of his property. Leland Stanford started buying land in the area in 1876 for a horse farm, called the Palo Alto Stock Farm. Stanford bought Ayrshire Farm in 1882.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: In 1884, Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane lost their only child Leland Stanford Jr. when he died of typhoid fever at age 15 and decided to create a university in his memory. In 1886, they proposed having the university's gateway be Mayfield. However, they had one condition: alcohol had to be banned from the town. Known for its 13 rowdy saloons, Mayfield rejected his request. This led them to drive the formation of a new temperance town with the help of their friend Timothy Hopkins of the Southern Pacific Railroad, who in 1887 bought of private land for the new townsite. This Hopkins Tract, bounded by El Camino Real, San Francisquito Creek, Boyce, Channing, Melville, and Hopkins Avenues, and Embarcadero Road, was proclaimed a local Heritage District during Palo Alto's centennial in 1994. The Stanfords set up their university, Stanford University, and a train stop (on University Avenue) by the new town. This new community was initially called University Park (the name "Palo Alto" at that time was attached to what is now College Terrace), but was incorporated in 1894 with the name Palo Alto. With the Stanfords' support, Palo Alto grew to the size of Mayfield. Mayfield eventually passed an ordinance banning saloons that took effect in January 1905.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: On July 2, 1925, Palo Alto voters approved the annexation of Mayfield and the two communities were officially consolidated on July 6, 1925. As a result Palo Alto has two downtown areas: one along University Avenue and one along California Avenue (renamed after the annexation since Palo Alto already had a Lincoln Avenue).


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto continued to annex more land, including the Stanford Shopping Center area in 1953. Stanford Research Park,


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Embarcadero Road northeast of Bayshore, and the West Bayshore/San Antonio Road area were also annexed during the 1950s. Large amounts of land west of Foothill Expressway were annexed between 1959 and 1968; this is mostly undeveloped and includes Foothills Park and Arastradero Preserve. The last major annexations were of Barron Park in 1975 and, in 1979, a large area of marshlands bordering the bay.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Many of Stanford University's first faculty members settled in the Professorville neighborhood of Palo Alto. Professorville, now a registered national historic district, is bounded by Kingsley, Lincoln, and Addison Avenues and the cross streets of Ramona, Bryant, and Waverley. The district includes a large number of well-preserved residences dating from the 1890s, including 833 Kingsley, 345 Lincoln, and 450 Kingsley. 1044 Bryant was the home of Russell Varian, co-inventor of the Klystron tube. The Federal Telegraph laboratory site, situated at 218 Channing, is a California Historical Landmark recognizing Lee de Forest's 1911 invention of the vacuum tube and electronic oscillator at that location. While not open to the public, the garage that housed the launch of Hewlett Packard is located at 367 Addison Avenue. Hewlett Packard recently restored the house and garage. A second historic district on Ramona Street can be found downtown between University and Hamilton Avenues. The Palo Alto Chinese School is the oldest in the entire Bay Area. It is also home to the second oldest opera company in California, the West Bay Opera.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto is also home to a long-standing baseball tradition. The Palo Alto Oaks are a collegiate summer baseball club that has been in the Bay Area since 1950, eight years longer than the San Francisco Giants. The Oaks were originally managed by Tony Makjavich for 49 years. The Oaks were going to fold before the summer 2016 season but were taken on by Daniel Palladino and Whaylan Price, Bay Area baseball coaches who didn't want to see the team die. The Oaks have a rich history within the Palo Alto community.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: It consists of two large parcels of land connected by a narrow corridor. The southern inland section, located south of Interstate 280, is hilly, rural, and lightly populated and is the site of Pearson-Arastradero Preserve and Foothills Park both part of the Palo Alto park system and also large parts of the Los Trancos and Monte Bello Open Space Preserves part of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. The city extends as far as Skyline Boulevard along the ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: The northern more densely populated parcel is bordered by San Francisquito Creek (with Menlo Park and East Palo Alto in adjacent San Mateo County beyond) to the north, San Francisco Bay to the north-east, Mountain View, Los Altos, and Los Altos Hills to the east and south-east and Stanford University to the south-west and west. Several major transit routes cross this parcel from the north-west to the south-east. The biggest and closest to the bay is the Bayshore Freeway and going inland are


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Foothill Expressway. Interstate 280 is parallel and crosses the narrow corridor of land that connects the two parcels that makeup Palo Alto. Somewhat perpendicular to these roads are Sand Hill Road from El Camino until it crosses San Francisquito Creek into Menlo Park, Embarcadero Road, Oregon Expressway/Page Mill Road, Arastradero Road/East Charleston Road, and San Antonio Road (the last forms part of the boundary with Mountain View).


title: Palo Alto, California

text: According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and , comprising 7.38%, is water.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: The official elevation is above sea level, but the city boundaries reach well into the northern section of the Santa Cruz Mountains.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto is crossed by several creeks that flow north in the direction of the San Francisco Bay, Adobe Creek near its eastern boundary, San Francisquito Creek on its western boundary, and Matadero Creek in between the other two. Arastradero Creek is a tributary to Matadero Creek, and Barron Creek is now diverted to Adobe Creek just south of Highway 101 by a diversion channel. The San Francisquito Creek mainstem is formed by the confluence of Corte Madera Creek and Bear Creek not far below Searsville Dam. Further downstream, Los Trancos Creek is a tributary to San Francisquito Creek below Interstate 280.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto has a number of significant natural habitats, including estuarine, riparian, and oak forest. Many of these habitats are visible in Foothills Park, which is owned by the city. The Charleston Slough contains a rich marsh and littoral zone, providing feeding areas for a variety of shorebirds and other estuarine wildlife.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Typical of the South Peninsula region of the San Francisco Bay Area, Palo Alto has a Mediterranean climate with mild, moderately wet winters and warm, dry summers. Typically, in the warmer months, as the sun goes down, the fog bank flows over the foothills to the west and covers the night sky, thus creating a blanket that helps trap the summer warmth absorbed during the day. Even so, it is rare for the overnight low temperature to exceed .


title: Palo Alto, California

text: In January, average daily temperatures range from a low of to a high of . In July, average temperatures range from to . The record high temperature was on September 6,2022 and the record low temperature was on December 24, 1990. Temperatures reach or higher on an average of 9.9 days. Temperatures drop to or lower on an average of 16.1 days.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Due to the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west, there is a "rain shadow" in Palo Alto, resulting in an average annual rainfall of only . Measurable rainfall occurs on an average of 57 days annually. The wettest year on record was 1983 with and the driest year was 1976 with . The most rainfall in one month was in February 1998 and the most rainfall in one day was on February 3, 1998. Measurable snowfall is very rare in the populated areas of Palo Alto, but fell on January 21, 1962. A dusting of snow occasionally occurs in the highest (unpopulated) section of Palo Alto near Skyline Ridge, where the elevation reaches up to .


title: Palo Alto, California

text: According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, Palo Alto has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate (Csb).


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto was incorporated in 1894. In 1909 a municipal charter created a local government consisting of a fifteen-member City Council, with responsibilities for various governmental functions delegated to appointed committees. In 1950, the City adopted a Council–manager government. Several appointed committees continue to advise the City Council on specialized issues, such as land-use planning, utilities, and libraries, but these committees no longer have direct authority over City staff. Currently, the City Council has seven members.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: The mayor and vice-mayor serve one year at a time, with terms ending in January. General municipal elections are held in November of even-numbered years. Council terms are four years long.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: According to one study in 2015, the city's effective property tax rate of 0.42% was the lowest of the California cities included in the study.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: According to the California Secretary of State, as of February 10, 2019, Palo Alto has 40,040 registered voters. Of those, 20,857 (52.1%) are registered Democrats, 4,689 (11.7%) are registered Republicans, and 13,520 (33.8%) have declined to state a political party.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: "Note: the US Census treats Hispanic/Latino as an ethnic category. This table excludes Latinos from the racial categories and assigns them to a separate category. Hispanics/Latinos can be of any race".


title: Palo Alto, California

text: The 2010 United States Census reported that Palo Alto had a population of 64,403. The population density was . The racial makeup of Palo Alto was 41,359 (64.2%) White, 17,461 (27.1%) Asian, 1,197 (1.9%) African American, 121 (0.2%) Native American, 142 (0.2%) Pacific Islander, 1,426 (2.2%) from other races, and 2,697 (4.2%) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 3,974 persons (6.2%).


title: Palo Alto, California

text: The Census reported that 63,820 people (99.1% of the population) lived in households, 205 (0.3%) lived in non-institutionalized group quarters, and 378 (0.6%) were institutionalized.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: There were 26,493 households, out of which 8,624 (32.6%) had children under the age of 18 living in them, 13,975 (52.7%) were opposite-sex married couples living together, 1,843 (7.0%) had a female householder with no husband present, 659 (2.5%) had a male householder with no wife present. There were 979 (3.7%) unmarried opposite-sex partnerships, and 188 (0.7%) same-sex married couples or partnerships. 7,982 households (30.1%) were made up of individuals, and 3,285 (12.4%) had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.41. There were 16,477 families (62.2% of all households); the average family size was 3.04.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: The population was spread out, with 15,079 people (23.4%) under the age of 18, 3,141 people (4.9%) aged 18 to 24, 17,159 people (26.6%) aged 25 to 44, 18,018 people (28.0%) aged 45 to 64, and 11,006 people (17.1%) who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 41.9 years. For every 100 females, there were 95.7 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 93.0 males.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: There were 28,216 housing units at an average density of , of which 14,766 (55.7%) were owner-occupied, and 11,727 (44.3%) were occupied by renters. The homeowner vacancy rate was 1.5%; the rental vacancy rate was 5.6%. 39,176 people (60.8% of the population) lived in owner-occupied housing units and 24,644 people (38.3%) lived in rental housing units.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: As of the census of 2000, there were 58,598 people, 25,216 households, and 14,600 families residing in the city. The population density was 955.8/km (2,475.3/mi). There were 26,048 housing units at an average density of 424.9/km (1,100.3/mi). The racial makeup of the city was 75.76% White, 2.02% Black, 0.21% Native American, 17.22% Asian, 0.14% Pacific Islander, 1.41% from other races, and 3.24% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 4.65% of the population.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: There were 25,216 households, of which 27.2% had resident children under the age of 18, 48.5% were married couples living together, 7.0% had a female householder with no husband present, and 42.1% were non-families. 32.6% of all households were made up of individuals, and 10.8% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.30 and the average family size was 2.95.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: In the city, the population was spread out, with 21.2% under the age of 18, 4.9% from 18 to 24, 32.4% from 25 to 44, 25.9% from 45 to 64, and 15.6% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 40 years. For every 100 females, there were 95.8 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 93.6 males.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: According to a 2007 estimate, the median income for a household in the city was $119,046, and the median income for a family was $153,197. Males had a median income of $91,051 versus $60,202 for females. The per capita income for the city was $56,257. About 3.2% of families and 4.8% of the population were below the poverty line, including 4.0% of those under age 18 and 5.0% of those age 65 or over.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto, north of Oregon Expressway, is filled with older homes, including Craftsman and California Colonials, some of which date back to the 1890s but most of which were built in the first four decades of the 20th century. South of Oregon Expressway, the homes, including many Joseph Eichler-designed or Eichler-style houses, were primarily built in the first 20 years after World War II.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: While the city contains homes that now cost anywhere from $800,000 to well over $40 million, much of Palo Alto's housing stock is in the style of California mid-century middle-class suburbia. The median home sale price for all of Palo Alto was $1.2 million in 2007 and $1.4 million in July 2009. Palo Alto ranked in as the 5th most expensive city in the United States , with an average home sales price of $1,677,000. In 2010, Palo Alto ranked as the 2nd most expensive city in the United States, with a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home listing for $1.48 million on average. Palo Alto is by some measures the most expensive college town in the United States.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: By 2020, residents' opposition to new housing has resulted in Palo Alto only allowing construction of enough low-income housing to meet 13% of its state-mandated share, and 6% of its share for very-low-income housing.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: In the 1920s, racial covenants were used that banned "persons of African, Japanese, Chinese, or Mongolian descent" from purchasing or renting homes in many neighborhoods throughout Palo Alto. In the 1950s, some movements opposed these policies, including the Palo Alto Fair Play Association, as well as architect and developer Joseph Eichler, who built almost 3,000 homes in Palo Alto.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Blockbusting strategies were also employed to instill fear in white neighborhoods and cause White flight out of areas on the outskirts of the city. Blockbusting refers to a practice realtors adopted in which they would advertise the incoming presence of a black family to a neighborhood, causing panic among the white residents who would consequently sell their houses at deflated prices very quickly. One famous blockbusting event is responsible for the prevailing demographic divides between Palo Alto and East Palo Alto.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: One of the most destructive policies at the time was redlining. Redlining was a policy put in place by the Federal Housing Association starting in 1937. Through the program, the association could rank neighborhoods from Type A, which was desirable, to Type D (outlined in red) which was deemed hazardous. Residents in Type D neighborhoods were ineligible for loans to buy or fix houses. The program was implemented in a way so that neighborhoods with any kind of African American population were ranked type C or D. This was also the case in Palo Alto and the surrounding areas. Palo Alto’s White neighborhoods were ranked mostly Type A and B, allowing for wealth accumulation and eventually resulting in the high housing prices we see today. On the other hand, the surrounding areas were all marked Type C and D, and African Americans found themselves being driven to the outskirts of Palo Alto, what is now mostly East Palo Alto, where there was no money from loans in the economy, leading to a state of decay.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: However, for the most part, Palo Alto’s housing was built on policies that are still reflected in the current demographics.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto serves as a central economic focal point of the Silicon Valley and is home to more than 7,000 businesses employing more than 98,000 people. Many prominent technology firms reside in the Stanford Research Park on Page Mill Road, while nearby Sand Hill Road in the adjacent city of Menlo Park is a notable hub of venture capitalists. The city's economy generally follows the economic trends of the rest of the Silicon Valley.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Many nearby Silicon Valley companies, no longer primarily in Palo Alto, were once headquartered and experienced major growth in Palo Alto, including Google (now in Mountain View), Facebook (now in Menlo Park), and PayPal (now in San Jose).


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto's retail and restaurant trade includes Stanford Shopping Center, an upscale open air shopping center established in 1955, and downtown Palo Alto, centered on University Avenue.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto is the location of the first street-level Apple Store, the first Apple mini store, the first West Coast Whole Foods Market store, and the first Victoria's Secret.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: According to the City's 2021 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top employers in the city are:


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto has a city-run and owned utility, City of Palo Alto Utilities (CPAU), which provides water, electric, gas service, and waste water disposal within city limits, with the minor exception of a rural portion of the city in the hills west of Interstate 280, past the Country Club, which does not receive gas from the City. Almost all other communities in northern California depend on Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) for gas and electricity.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Water and Gas Services (WGS) operates gas and water distribution networks within the city limits. The city operates both gas meters and the distribution pipelines. Water comes from city-operated watershed and wells and the City and County of San Francisco Hetch Hetchy system. The city is located in Santa Clara Valley Water District, North Zone. Hetch Hetchy pipeline #3 and #4 pass through the city.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: The city operates its own electric power distribution network and telemetry cable network. Interconnection points tie the city into PG&E's electric transmission system, which brings power from several sources to the city. Palo Alto is a member of a joint powers authority (the Northern California Power Agency), which cooperatively generates electricity for government power providers such as the City of Santa Clara, the City of Redding, and the Port of Oakland. Roughly the same group of entities operate the Transmission Agency of Northern California (TANC). TANC transports power over its own lines from as far as British Columbia through an interconnection with the federal Bonneville Power Administration. A local oddity is a series of joint poles; those primary conductor cross arms are marked PGE and CPA (City of Palo Alto) to identify each utility's side of the shared cross arms.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Palo Alto has an ongoing community debate about the city providing fiber optic connectivity to all residences. A series of pilot programs have been proposed. One proposal called for the city to install dark fiber, which would be made live by a contractor.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: Services traditionally attributed to a cable television provider were sold to a regulated commercial concern. Previously the cable system was operated by a cooperative called Palo Alto Cable Coop.


title: Palo Alto, California

text: The former Regional Bell Operating Company in Palo Alto was Pacific Telephone, now called AT&T Inc., and previously called SBC and Pacific Bell. One of the earliest central office facilities switching Palo Alto calls is the historic Davenport central office (CO) at 529 Bryant Street. The building was sold and is now the home of the Palo Alto Internet Exchange. The former CO building is marked by a bronze plaque and is located on the north side of Bryant Street between University Avenue and Hamilton Avenue. It was called Davenport after the exchange name at the introduction of dial telephone service in Palo Alto. For example, modern numbers starting with 325- were Davenport 5 in the 1950s and '60s. The Step-by-Step office was scrapped and replaced by stored-program-controlled equipment at a different location about 1980. Stanford calls ran on a Step-by-Step Western Electric 701 PBX until the university purchased its own switch about 1980. It had the older, traditional Bell System 600 Hz+120 Hz dial tone. The old 497-number PBX, MDF, and battery string were housed in a steel building at 333 Bonair Siding. From the 1950s to 1980s, the bulk of Palo Alto calls were switched on Number 5 Crossbar systems. By the mid-1980s, these electromechanical systems had been junked. Under the Bell System's regulated monopoly, local coin telephone calls were ten cents until the early 1980s.