title: Arab world

text: The Arab League is a regional organisation that aims (among other things) to consider in a general way the affairs and interests of the Arab countries and sets out the following definition of an Arab:


title: Arab world

text: This standard territorial definition is sometimes seen to be inappropriate or problematic, and may be supplemented with certain additional elements (see ancillary linguistic definition below).


title: Arab world

text: As an alternative to, or in combination with, the standard territorial definition, the Arab world may be defined as consisting of peoples and states united to at least some degree by Arabic language, culture or geographic contiguity, or those states or territories in which the majority of the population speaks Arabic, and thus may also include populations of the Arab diaspora.


title: Arab world

text: When an ancillary linguistic definition is used in combination with the standard territorial definition, various parameters may be applied to determine whether a state or territory should be included in this alternative definition of the Arab world. These parameters may be applied to the states and territories of the Arab League (which constitute the Arab world under the standard definition) and to other states and territories. Typical parameters that may be applied include: whether Arabic is widely spoken; whether Arabic is an official or national language; or whether an Arabic cognate language is widely spoken.


title: Arab world

text: While Arabic dialects are spoken in a number of Arab League states, Literary Arabic is official in all of them. Several states have declared Arabic to be an official or national language, although Arabic is not as widely spoken there. As members of the Arab League, however, they are considered part of the Arab world under the standard territorial definition.


title: Arab world

text: Somalia has two official languages, Arabic and Somali, while Somaliland has three, Arabic, Somali and English. Both Arabic and Somali belong to the larger Afro-Asiatic language family. Although Arabic is widely spoken by many people in the north and urban areas in the south, Somali is the most widely used language, and contains many Arabic loan words.


title: Arab world

text: Similarly, Djibouti has two official languages, Arabic and French. It also has several formally recognized national languages; besides Somali, many people speak Afar, which is also an Afro-Asiatic language. The majority of the population speaks Somali and Afar, although Arabic is also widely used for trade and other activities.


title: Arab world

text: The Comoros has three official languages: Arabic, Comorian and French. Comorian is the most widely spoken language, with Arabic having a religious significance, and French being associated with the educational system.


title: Arab world

text: Chad, Eritrea and Israel all recognize Arabic as an official or working language, but none of them is a member-state of the Arab League, although both Chad and Eritrea are observer states of the League (with possible future membership) and have large populations of Arabic speakers.


title: Arab world

text: Israel is not a part of the Arab world. By some definitions, Arab citizens of Israel may concurrently be considered a constituent part of the Arab world.


title: Arab world

text: Iran has about 1.5 million Arabic speakers. Iranian Arabs are mainly found in Ahvaz, a southwestern region in the Khuzestan Province; others inhabit the Bushehr and Hormozgan provinces and the city of Qom. Mali and Senegal recognize Hassaniya, the Arabic dialect of the Moorish ethnic minority, as a national language. Greece and Cyprus also recognize Cypriot Maronite Arabic under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Additionally, Malta, though not part of the Arab world, has as its official language Maltese. The language is grammatically akin to Maghrebi Arabic.


title: Arab world

text: In the Arab world, Modern Standard Arabic, derived from Classical Arabic (symptomatic of Arabic diglossia), serves as an official language in the Arab League states, and Arabic dialects are used as lingua franca. Various indigenous languages are also spoken, which predate the spread of the Arabic language. This contrasts with the situation in the wider Islamic world, where, in contiguous Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Perso-Arabic script is used and Arabic is the primary liturgical language, but the tongue is not official at the state level or spoken as a vernacular. Arabs constitute around one quarter of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the Islamic world.


title: Arab world

text: The majority of people in the Arab world adhere to Islam, and the religion has official status in most countries. Shariah law exists partially in the legal system in some countries (especially in the Arabian peninsula), while others are legislatively secular. The majority of the Arab countries adhere to Sunni Islam. Iraq and Bahrain, however, are Shia majority countries, while Lebanon, Yemen, and Kuwait have large Shia minorities. In Saudi Arabia, Ismailite pockets are also found in the eastern Al-Hasa region and the southern city of Najran. Ibadi Islam is practiced in Oman, where Ibadis constitute around 75% of Muslims.


title: Arab world

text: There are also Christian adherents in the Arab world, particularly in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine. Small native Christian communities can be found also throughout the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. Coptic, Maronite and Assyrian Christian enclaves exist in the Nile Valley, Levant and northern Iraq respectively. There are also Assyrian, Armenian, Syriac-Aramean and Arab Christians throughout Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan. There are also native Arab Christian communities in Algeria, Bahrain, Morocco, Kuwait and Tunisia.


title: Arab world

text: Smaller ethno-religious minorities across the Arab League include the Yezidis, Yarsan and Shabaks (mainly in Iraq), the Druzes (mainly in Syria and also in Lebanon, Jordan) and Mandaeans (in Iraq). Formerly, there were significant minorities of Jews throughout the Arab World. However, the Arab–Israeli conflict prompted their mass exodus between 1948 and 1972. Today small Jewish communities remain, ranging anywhere from just 10 in Bahrain, to more than 1,000 in Tunisia and some 3,000 in Morocco. Historically, slavery in the Muslim world developed out of pre-Islamic practices of slavery in the Arab world.


title: Arab world

text: According to UNESCO, the average rate of adult literacy (ages 15 and older) in this region is 76.9%. In Mauritania and Yemen, the rate is lower than the average, at barely over 50%. Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan record a high adult literacy rate of over 90%. The average rate of adult literacy shows steady improvement, and the absolute number of adult illiterates fell from 64 million to around 58 million between 1990 and 2000–2004. Overall, the gender disparity in adult literacy is high in this region, and of the illiteracy rate, women account for two-thirds, with only 69 literate women for every 100 literate men. The average GPI (Gender Parity Index) for adult literacy is 0.72, and gender disparity can be observed in Egypt, Morocco, and Yemen. Above all, the GPI of Yemen is only 0.46 in a 53% adult literacy rate. According to a UN survey, in the Arab world, the average person reads four pages a year and one new title is published each year for every 12,000 people. The Arab Thought Foundation reports that just above 8% of people in Arab countries aspire to get an education.


title: Arab world

text: Literacy rate is higher among the youth than adults. Youth literacy rate (ages 15–24) in the Arab region increased from 63.9 to 76.3% from 1990 to 2002. The average rate of GCC States *Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC)


title: Arab world

text: Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) was 94%, followed by the Maghreb at 83.2% and the Mashriq at 73.6%.


title: Arab world

text: The United Nations published an Arab human development report in 2002, 2003 and 2004. These reports, written by researchers from the Arab world, address some sensitive issues in the development of Arab countries: women empowerment, availability of education and information among others.


title: Arab world

text: There is no single description of Arab cinema since it includes films from various countries and cultures of the Arab world and therefore does not have one form, structure, or style. In its inception, Arab cinema was mostly an imitation of Western Cinema. However; it has and continues to constantly change and evolve. Arab Cinema is a constantly changing and evolving industry. It mostly includes films made in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. However, Egypt is a pioneer among Arab countries in the field of cinema. Each country in the region has its own unique characteristics and identifiable brand of cinema.


title: Arab world

text: Elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, film production was scarce until the late 1960s and early 1970s when filmmakers began to received funding and financial assistance from state organizations. This was during the post-independence and is when most Arab cinema took root. Most films produced at that time were funded by the state and contained a nationalistic dimension. These films helped to advance certain social causes such as independence, and other social, economic and political agendas.


title: Arab world

text: A sustained film industry was able to emerge in Egypt when other parts of the Arab world had only been able to sporadically produce feature-length films due to limited financing.


title: Arab world

text: Arabic cinema is dominated by films from Egypt. Three quarters of all Arab movies are produced in Egypt. According to film critic and historian Roy Armes, the Cinema of Lebanon is the only other cinema in the Arabic-speaking region, beside Egypt's, that could amount to a national cinema.


title: Arab world

text: While Egyptian and Lebanese cinema have a long history of production, most other Arab countries did not witness film production until after independence, and even today, the majority of film production in countries like Bahrain, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates is limited to television or short films.


title: Arab world

text: There is increased interest in films originating in the Arab world. For example, films from Algeria, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria and Tunisia are making wider and more frequent rounds than ever before in local film festivals and repertoire theaters.


title: Arab world

text: Arab cinema has explored many topics from politics, colonialism, tradition, modernity and social taboos. It has also attempted to escape from its earlier tendency to mimic and rely on Western film devices. In fact, colonization did not only influence Arab films, but it also had an impact on Arab movies theaters. Apart from the history of Arab cinema, recently the portrayal of women became an important aspect in the production of Arab cinema. Arab woman shaped a great portion of the film industry in the Arab world by employing their cinematic talents in improving the production of Arab films.


title: Arab world

text: However, the production of Arab cinema has declined in the last decades and many filmmakers in the Middle East gathered to hold a meeting and discuss the current state of Arab cinema.


title: Arab world

text: Women in the Arab world are still denied equality of opportunity, although their disenfranchisement is a critical factor crippling the Arab nations' quest to return to the first rank of global leaders in commerce, learning and culture, according to a United Nations-sponsored report in 2008.


title: Arab world

text: Rapists are often treated leniently or acquitted in the Arab region if they marry their victims. 37% of Arab women experienced violence in their lifetime but the numbers may be higher according to indicators. In some countries, the share of women experiencing violence and abuse by intimate partner reaches 70%.


title: Arab world

text: The Arabs historically originate as a Central Semitic group in southern Levant and northern Arabian peninsula. Arab tribes and federations such as Nabataeans, Tanukhids, Salihids, Ghassanids, and numerous other groups were prevalent in southern Levant (Syrian Desert) and northern Arabia. Their expansion beyond Arabia and the Syrian desert is due to the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. Iraq was conquered in 633, Levant (modern Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon ) between 636 and 640 CE.


title: Arab world

text: Egypt was conquered in 639, and gradually Arabized during the medieval period. A distinctively Egyptian Arabic language emerged by the 16th century.


title: Arab world

text: The culture of Sudan today depends on the tribe, some have a pure Nubian, Beja, or Arabic culture and some have a mixture of Arab and Nubian elements.


title: Arab world

text: The Arab Abbasid Caliphate fell to the Mongol invasions in the 13th century. Egypt, the Levant and Hejaz also came under the Turkish Mamluk Sultanate.


title: Arab world

text: By 1570, the Turkish Ottoman Empire controlled most of the Arab world. However, Morocco remained under the rule of the Zenata Wattasid dynasty, which was succeeded by the Saadi dynasty in the 16th to 17th centuries. The Ajuran Sultanate also held sway in the southern part of the Horn region.


title: Arab world

text: The sentiment of Arab nationalism arose in the second half of the 19th century along with other nationalisms within the declining Ottoman Empire.


title: Arab world

text: When the Ottoman Empire collapsed as a result of World War I, much of the Arab world came to be controlled by the European colonial empires: Mandatory Palestine, Mandatory Iraq, British protectorate of Egypt, French protectorate of Morocco, Italian Libya, French Tunisia, French Algeria, Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon and the so-called Trucial States, a British protectorate formed by the sheikhdoms on the former "Pirate Coast".


title: Arab world

text: These Arab states only gained their independence during or after World War II: the Republic of Lebanon in 1943, the Syrian Arab Republic and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1946, the Kingdom of Libya in 1951, the Kingdom of Egypt in 1952, the Kingdom of Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, the Republic of Iraq in 1958, the Somali Republic in 1960, Algeria in 1962, and the United Arab Emirates in 1971.


title: Arab world

text: By contrast, Saudi Arabia had fragmented with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and was unified under Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia by 1932.


title: Arab world

text: The Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen also seceded directly from the Ottoman Empire in 1918. Oman, apart from brief intermittent Persian and Portuguese rule, has been self-governing since the 8th century.


title: Arab world

text: The Arab League was formed in 1945 to represent the interests of the Arabs, and especially to pursue the political unification of the Arab world, a project known as Pan-Arabism.


title: Arab world

text: There were some short-lived attempts at such unification in the mid-20th century, notably the United Arab Republic of 1958 to 1961.


title: Arab world

text: The Arab League's main goal is to unify politically the Arab populations so defined. Its permanent headquarters are located in Cairo. However, it was moved temporarily to Tunis during the 1980s, after Egypt was expelled for signing the Camp David Accords (1978).


title: Arab world

text: Pan-Arabism has mostly been abandoned as an ideology since the 1980s, and was replaced by Pan-Islamism on one hand, and individual nationalisms on the other.


title: Arab world

text: The unification of Saudi Arabia was a 30-year-long military and political campaign, by which the various tribes, sheikhdoms, and emirates of most of the Arabian Peninsula were conquered by the House of Saud, or "Al Saud", between 1902 and 1932, when the modern-day Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was proclaimed. Carried out under the charismatic Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, this process created what is sometimes referred to as the "Third Saudi State", to differentiate it from the first and second states that existed under the Al Saud clan.


title: Arab world

text: The Al-Saud had been in exile in Ottoman Iraq since 1893 following the disintegration of the Second Saudi State and the rise of Jebel Shammar under the Al Rashid clan. In 1902, Ibn Saud recaptured Riyadh, the Al Saud dynasty's former capital. He went on to subdue the rest of Nejd, Al-Hasa, Jebel Shammar, Asir, and Hejaz (location of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina) between 1913 and 1926. The resultant polity was named the Kingdom of Nejd and Hejaz from 1927 until it was further consolidated with Al-Hasa and Qatif into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.


title: Arab world

text: The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 has given rise to the Arab–Israeli conflict, one of the major unresolved geopolitical conflicts.


title: Arab world

text: The Arab states in changing alliances were involved in a number of wars with Israel and its western allies between 1948 and 1973, including the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973.


title: Arab world

text: The Iran–Iraq War (also known as the First Gulf War and by various other names) was an armed conflict between the armed forces of Iraq and Iran, lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, making it the second longest conventional war of the 20th century. It was initially referred to in English as the "Gulf War" prior to the "Gulf War" of 1990.


title: Arab world

text: The war began when Iraq invaded Iran, launching a simultaneous invasion by air and land into Iranian territory on 22 September 1980 following a long history of border disputes, and fears of Shia Islam insurgency among Iraq's long-suppressed Shia majority influenced by the Iranian Revolution. Iraq was also aiming to replace Iran as the dominant Persian Gulf state. Although Iraq hoped to take advantage of the revolutionary chaos in Iran (see Iranian Revolution, 1979) and attacked without formal warning, they made only limited progress into Iran and were quickly repelled by the Iranians who regained virtually all lost territory by June 1982. For the next six years, Iran was on the offensive.


title: Arab world

text: The Lebanese Civil War was a multifaceted civil war in Lebanon, lasting from 1975 to 1990 and resulting in an estimated 120,000 fatalities. Another one million people (a quarter of the population) were wounded, and today approximately 76,000 people remain displaced within Lebanon. There was also a mass exodus of almost one million people from Lebanon.


title: Arab world

text: The Western Sahara War was an armed struggle between the Sahrawi Polisario Front and Morocco between 1975 and 1991, being the most significant phase of the Western Sahara conflict. The conflict erupted after the withdrawal of Spain from the Spanish Sahara in accordance with the Madrid Accords, by which it transferred administrative control of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania, but not the sovereignty. In 1975, Moroccan government organized the Green March of some 350,000 Moroccan citizens, escorted by around 20,000 troops, who entered Western Sahara, trying to establish Moroccan presence. While at first met with just minor resistance by the Polisario, Morocco later engaged a long period of guerilla warfare with the Sahrawi nationalists. During the late 1970s, the Polisario Front, desiring to establish an independent state in the territory, successively fought both Mauritania and Morocco. In 1979, Mauritania withdrew from the conflict after signing a peace treaty with the Polisario. The war continued in low intensity throughout the 1980s, though Morocco made several attempts to take the upper hand in 1989–1991. A cease-fire agreement was finally reached between the Polisario Front and Morocco in September 1991.


title: Arab world

text: The North Yemen Civil War was fought in North Yemen between royalists of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen and factions of the Yemen Arab Republic from 1962 to 1970. The war began with a coup d'état carried out by the republican leader, Abdullah as-Sallal, which dethroned the newly crowned Imam al-Badr and declared Yemen a republic under his presidency. The Imam escaped to the Saudi Arabian border and rallied popular support.


title: Arab world

text: The Somali Civil War is an ongoing civil war taking place in Somalia. It began in 1991, when a coalition of clan-based armed opposition groups ousted the nation's long-standing military government.


title: Arab world

text: Various factions began competing for influence in the power vacuum that followed, which precipitated an aborted UN peacekeeping attempt in the mid-1990s. A period of decentralization ensued, characterized by a return to customary and religious law in many areas as well as the establishment of autonomous regional governments in the northern part of the country. The early 2000s saw the creation of fledgling interim federal administrations, culminating in the establishment of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in 2004. In 2006, the TFG, assisted by Ethiopian troops, assumed control of most of the nation's southern conflict zones from the newly formed Islamic Courts Union (ICU). The ICU subsequently splintered into more radical groups, notably Al-Shabaab, which have since been fighting the Somali government and its AMISOM allies for control of the region. In 2011, a coordinated military operation between the Somali military and multinational forces began, which is believed to represent one of the final stages in the war's Islamist insurgency.


title: Arab world

text: The popular protests throughout the Arab world of late 2010 to the present have been directed against authoritarian leadership and associated political corruption, paired with demands for more democratic rights. The two most violent and prolonged conflicts in the aftermath of the Arab Spring are the Libyan Civil War and Syrian Civil War.


title: Arab world

text: While the Arab world had been of limited interest to the European colonial powers, the British Empire being mostly interested in the Suez Canal as a route to British India, the economic and geopolitical situation changed dramatically after the discovery of large petroleum deposits in the 1930s, coupled with the vastly increased demand for petroleum in the west as a result of the Second Industrial Revolution.


title: Arab world

text: The Persian Gulf is particularly well-endowed with this strategic raw material: five Persian Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar, are among the top ten petroleum or gas exporters worldwide. In Africa, Algeria (10th world) and Libya are important gas exporters. In addition Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia, and Sudan all have smaller but significant reserves. Where present, these have had significant effects on regional politics, often enabling rentier states, leading to economic disparities between oil-rich and oil-poor countries, and, particularly in the more sparsely populated states of the Persian Gulf and Libya, triggering extensive labor immigration. It is believed that the Arab world holds approximately 46% of the world's total proven oil reserves and a quarter of the world's natural-gas reserves.


title: Arab world

text: Islamism and Pan-Islamism were on the rise during the 1980s. The Hezbollah, a militant Islamic party in Lebanon, was founded in 1982.


title: Arab world

text: Islamic terrorism became a problem in the Arab world in the 1970s to 1980s. While the Muslim Brotherhood had been active in Egypt since 1928, their militant actions were limited to assassination attempts on political leaders.


title: Arab world

text: Today, Arab states are characterized by their autocratic rulers and lack of democratic control. The 2016 "Democracy Index" classifies Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine as "hybrid regimes", Tunisia as a "flawed democracy" and all other Arab states as "authoritarian regimes". Similarly, the 2011 Freedom House report classifies the Comoros and Mauritania as "electoral democracies", Lebanon, Kuwait and Morocco as "partly free", and all other Arab states as "not free".


title: Arab world

text: The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq forces, led to the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War. Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia joined a multinational coalition that opposed Iraq. Displays of support for Iraq by Jordan and Palestine resulted in strained relations between many of the Arab states. After the war, a so-called "Damascus Declaration" formalized an alliance for future joint Arab defensive actions between Egypt, Syria, and the GCC states.


title: Arab world

text: A chain of events leading to the destabilization of the authoritarian regimes established during the 1950s throughout the Arab world became apparent during the early years of the 21st century. The 2003 invasion of Iraq led to the collapse of the Baathist regime and ultimate execution of Saddam Hussein.


title: Arab world

text: A growing class of young, educated, secular citizens with access to modern media such as Al Jazeera (since 1996) and communicating via the internet began to form a third force besides the classical dichotomy of Pan-Arabism vs. Pan-Islamism that had dominated the second half of the 20th century. These citizens wish for reform in their country's religious institutions.


title: Arab world

text: In Syria, the Damascus Spring of 2000 to 2001 heralded the possibility of democratic change, but the Baathist regime managed to suppress the movement.


title: Arab world

text: In 2003, the Egyptian Movement for Change, popularly known as "Kefaya", was launched to oppose the Mubarak regime and to establish democratic reforms and greater civil liberties in Egypt.


title: Arab world

text: Different forms of government are represented in the Arab World: Some of the countries are monarchies: Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The other Arab countries are all republics. With the exception of Lebanon, Tunisia, Iraq, Palestine, and recently Mauritania, democratic elections throughout the Arab World are generally viewed as compromised, due to outright vote rigging, intimidation of opposition parties, and severe restraints on civil liberties and political dissent.


title: Arab world

text: After World War II, Pan-Arabism sought to unite all Arabic-speaking countries into one political entity. Only Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya and North Yemen considered the short-lived unification of the United Arab Republic. Historical divisions, competing local nationalisms, and geographical sprawl were major reasons for the failure of Pan-Arabism. Arab Nationalism was another strong force in the region which peaked during the mid-20th century and was professed by many leaders in Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Syria, and Iraq. Arab Nationalist leaders of this period included Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, Zaki al-Arsuzi, Constantin Zureiq and Shukri al-Kuwatli of Syria, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr of Iraq, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco, and Shakib Arslan of Lebanon.


title: Arab world

text: Later and current Arab Nationalist leaders include Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya, Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad of Syria. The diverse Arab states generally maintained close ties but distinct national identities developed and strengthened with the social, historical and political realities of the past 60 years. This has made the idea of a pan-Arab nation-state increasingly less feasible and likely. Additionally, an upsurge in political Islam has since led to a greater emphasis on pan-Islamic rather than pan-Arab identity amongst some Arab Muslims. Arab nationalists who once opposed Islamic movements as a threat to their power, now deal with them differently for reasons of political reality.


title: Arab world

text: Many of the modern borders of the Arab World were drawn by European imperial powers during the 19th and early 20th century. However, some of the larger states (in particular Egypt and Syria) have historically maintained geographically definable boundaries, on which some of the modern states are roughly based. The 14th-century Egyptian historian Al-Maqrizi, for instance, defines Egypt's boundaries as extending from the Mediterranean in the north to lower Nubia in the south; and between the Red Sea in the east and the oases of the Western/Libyan desert. The modern borders of Egypt, therefore, are not a creation of European powers, and are at least in part based on historically definable entities which are in turn based on certain cultural and ethnic identifications.


title: Arab world

text: At other times, kings, emirs or sheikhs were placed as semi-autonomous rulers over the newly created nation states, usually chosen by the same imperial powers that for some drew the new borders, for services rendered to European powers like the British Empire, e.g. Sherif Hussein ibn Ali. Many African states did not attain independence until the 1960s from France after bloody insurgencies for their freedom. These struggles were settled by the imperial powers approving the form of independence given, so as a consequence almost all of these borders have remained. Some of these borders were agreed upon without consultation of those individuals that had served the colonial interests of Britain or France. One such agreement solely between Britain and France (to the exclusion of Sherif Hussein ibn Ali), signed in total secrecy until Lenin released the full text, was the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Another influential document written without the consensus of the local population was the Balfour Declaration.


title: Arab world

text: As former director of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, Efraim Halevy, now a director at the Hebrew University said,


title: Arab world

text: As of 2006, the Arab world accounts for two-fifths of the gross domestic product and three-fifths of the trade of the wider Muslim world.


title: Arab world

text: The Arab states are mostly, although not exclusively, developing economies and derive their export revenues from oil and gas, or the sale of other raw materials. Recent years have seen significant economic growth in the Arab World, due largely to an increase in oil and gas prices, which tripled between 2001 and 2006, but also due to efforts by some states to diversify their economic base. Industrial production has risen, for example the amount of steel produced between 2004 and 2005 rose from 8.4 to 19 million tonnes. (Source: Opening speech of Mahmoud Khoudri, Algeria's Industry Minister, at the 37th General Assembly of the Iron & Steel Arab Union, Algiers, May 2006). However even 19 million tons pa still only represents 1.7% of global steel production, and remains inferior to the production of countries like Brazil.


title: Arab world

text: The main economic organisations in the Arab World are the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), comprising the states in the Persian Gulf, and the Union of the Arab Maghreb (UMA), made up of North African States. The GCC has achieved some success in financial and monetary terms, including plans to establish a common currency in the Persian Gulf region. Since its foundation in 1989, the UMA's most significant accomplishment has been the establishment of a 7000 km highway crossing North Africa from Mauritania to Libya's border with Egypt. The central stretch of the highway, expected to be completed in 2010, will cross Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. In recent years a new term has been coined to define a greater economic region: the MENA region (standing for "Middle East and North Africa") is becoming increasingly popular, especially with support from the current US administration.


title: Arab world

text: As of August 2009 it was reported that Saudi Arabia is the strongest Arab economy according to World Bank.


title: Arab world

text: Saudi Arabia remains the top Arab economy in terms of total GDP. It is Asia's eleventh largest economy, followed by Egypt and Algeria, which were also the second and third largest economies in Africa (after South Africa), in 2006. In terms of GDP per capita, Qatar is the richest developing country in the world.


title: Arab world

text: The total GDP of all Arab countries in 1999 was US$531.2 billion. By grouping all the latest GDP figures, the total Arab world GDP is estimated to be worth at least $2.8 trillion in 2011. This is only smaller than the GDP of the US, China, Japan and Germany.


title: Arab world

text: The Arab World stretches across more than of North Africa and the part of North-East Africa and South-West Asia. The eastern part of the Arab world is called the "Mashriq". Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania are the "Maghreb" or "Maghrib".


title: Arab world

text: The term "Arab" often connotes the Arabian Peninsula, but the larger (and more populous) part of the Arab World is North Africa. Its eight million square kilometers include two of the largest countries of the African continent, Algeria (2.4 million km) in the center of the region and Sudan (1.9 million km) in the southeast. Algeria is about three-quarters the size of India, or about one-and-a-half times the size of Alaska, the largest state in the United States. The largest country in the Arab Western Asia is Saudi Arabia (2 million km).


title: Arab world

text: At the other extreme, the smallest autonomous mainland Arab country is Lebanon (10,452 km), and the smallest island Arab country is Bahrain (665 km).


title: Arab world

text: Notably, every Arab country borders a sea or ocean, with the exception of the Arab region of northern Chad, which is completely landlocked. Iraq is actually nearly landlocked, as it has only a very narrow access to the Persian Gulf.


title: Arab world

text: The political borders of the Arab world have wandered, leaving Arab minorities in non-Arab countries of the Sahel and the Horn of Africa as well as in the Middle Eastern countries of Cyprus, Turkey and Iran, and also leaving non-Arab minorities in Arab countries. However, the basic geography of sea, desert and mountain provides the enduring natural boundaries for this region.


title: Arab world

text: The Arab world straddles two continents, Africa and Asia. It is mainly oriented along an east–west axis.


title: Arab world

text: Arab Africa comprises the entire northern third of the continent. It is surrounded by water on three sides (west, north, and east) and desert or desert scrubland on the fourth (south).


title: Arab world

text: In the west, it is bounded by the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. From northeast to southwest, Morocco, Western Sahara (mostly unilaterally annexed by Morocco), and Mauritania make up the roughly 2,000 kilometers of Arab Atlantic coastline. The southwestern sweep of the coast is gentle but substantial, such that Mauritania's capital, Nouakchott (18°N, 16°W), is far enough west to share longitude with Iceland (13–22°W). Nouakchott is the westernmost capital of the Arab World and the third-westernmost in Africa, and sits on the Atlantic fringe of the southwestern Sahara. Next south along the coast from Mauritania is Senegal, whose abrupt border belies the gradient in culture from Arab to indigenous African that historically characterizes this part of West Africa.


title: Arab world

text: Arab Africa's boundary to the north is again a continental boundary, the Mediterranean Sea. This boundary begins in the west with the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, the thirteen kilometer wide channel that connects the Mediterranean with the Atlantic to the west, and separates Morocco from Spain to the north. East along the coast from Morocco are Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, followed by Egypt, which forms the region's (and the continent's) northeastern corner. The coast turns briefly but sharply south at Tunisia, slopes more gently southeastward through the Libyan capital of Tripoli, and bumps north through Libya's second city, Benghazi, before turning straight east again through Egypt's second city, Alexandria, at the mouth of the Nile. Along with the spine of Italy to its north, Tunisia thus marks the junction of western and eastern Mediterranean, and a cultural transition as well: west of Egypt begins the region of the Arab World known as the Maghreb include (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania).


title: Arab world

text: Historically the 4,000-kilometer Mediterranean boundary has fluttered. Population centers north of it in Europe have invited contact and Arab exploration—mostly friendly, though sometimes not. Islands and peninsulas near the Arab coast have changed hands. The islands of Sicily and Malta lie just a hundred kilometers east of the Tunisian city of Carthage, which has been a point of contact with Europe since its founding in the first millennium BCE; both Sicily and Malta at times have been part of the Arab World. Just across the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco, regions of the Iberian peninsula were part of the Arab World throughout the Middle Ages, extending the northern boundary at times to the foothills of the Pyrenees and leaving a substantial mark on local and wider European and Western culture.


title: Arab world

text: The northern boundary of the African Arab world has also fluttered briefly in the other direction, first through the Crusades and later through the imperial involvement of France, Britain, Spain, and Italy. Another visitor from northern shores, Turkey, controlled the east of the region for centuries, though not as a colonizer. Spain still maintains two small enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla (called "Morocco Espanol"), along the otherwise Moroccan coast. Overall this wave has ebbed, though like the Arab expansion north it has left its mark. The proximity of North Africa to Europe has always encouraged interaction, and this continues with Arab immigration to Europe and European interest in the Arab countries today. However, population centers and the physical fact of the sea keeps this boundary of the Arab World settled on the Mediterranean coastline.


title: Arab world

text: To the east, the Red Sea defines the boundary between Africa and Asia, and thus also between Arab Africa and Arab Western Asia. This sea is a long and narrow waterway with a northwest tilt, stretching 2,300 kilometers from Egypt's Sinai peninsula southeast to the Bab-el-Mandeb strait between Djibouti in Africa and Yemen in Arabia but on average just 150 kilometers wide. Though the sea is navigable along its length, historically much contact between Arab Africa and Arab Western Asia has been either overland across the Sinai or by sea across the Mediterranean or the narrow Bab al Mendeb strait. From northwest to southeast, Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea form the African coastline, with Djibouti marking Bab al Mendeb's African shore.


title: Arab world

text: Southeast along the coast from Djibouti is Somalia, but the Somali coast soon makes a 90-degree turn and heads northeast, mirroring a bend in the coast of Yemen across the water to the north and defining the south coast of the Gulf of Aden. The Somali coast then takes a hairpin turn back southwest to complete the horn of Africa. For six months of the year the monsoon winds blow from up equatorial Somalia, past Arabia and over the small Yemeni archipelago of Socotra, to rain on India; they then switch directions and blow back. Hence the east- and especially southeast-coast boundary of Arab Africa has historically been a gateway for maritime trade and cultural exchange with both East Africa and the subcontinent. The trade winds also help explain the presence of the Comoros islands, an Arab-African country, off the coast of Mozambique, near Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, the southernmost part of the Arab World.


title: Arab world

text: The southern boundary of Arab North Africa is the strip of scrubland known as the Sahel that crosses the continent south of the Sahara.


title: Arab world

text: The Western Asian Arab region comprises the Arabian Peninsula, most of the Levant (excluding Cyprus and Israel), most of Mesopotamia (excluding parts of Turkey and Iran) and the Persian Gulf region. The peninsula is roughly a tilted rectangle that leans back against the slope of northeast Africa, the long axis pointing toward Turkey and Europe.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: John Curtis Holmes ( Estes; August 8, 1944 – March 13, 1988), better known as John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd (after the lead character he portrayed in a series of related films), was an American pornographic film actor. He ranks among the most prolific adult film performers, with documented credits for at least 573 films.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Holmes was best known for his exceptionally large penis, which was heavily promoted for its length and thickness. However no documented measurement of Holmes' actual penis length, girth, tumescence, sexual stamina, or ejaculate volume has ever been confirmed.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Near the end of his life, Holmes attained notoriety for his reputed involvement in the Wonderland murders of July 1981 and eventually for his death from complications caused by AIDS in March 1988. He was the subject of several books, a lengthy essay in "Rolling Stone" and two feature-length documentaries, and was the inspiration for two Hollywood movies ("Boogie Nights" and "Wonderland").


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Holmes was born John Curtis Estes on August 8, 1944, in the small rural town of Ashville, Ohio, about south of Columbus. He was the youngest of four children born to 26-year-old Mary June (née Barton) Holmes, but the name of his father, railroad worker Carl Estes, was left blank on his birth certificate. Mary had married Edgar Harvey Holmes, who was the father of her three older children Dale, Edward and Anne. She and Edgar were married and divorced three times, as is documented by wedding certificates dated April 13, 1936, August 13, 1945, and September 12, 1947. At the time of their first marriage in 1936, Edgar was 35 years old and divorced, while Mary was 17. After divorcing for the third and final time, Edgar and Mary each married one more time.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Mary changed John's surname from Estes to Holmes when he was a child. In 1986, when Holmes applied for a passport for the first time prior to a trip to Italy, his mother reportedly provided him with the handwritten copy of his original birth certificate, which led Holmes to learn that his biological father was Carl Estes.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Holmes' mother was said to be a devout Southern Baptist and with her children regularly attended church in Millport, Ohio. By contrast, his stepfather Edgar was an alcoholic who would come home inebriated, stumble about the house and even vomit on the children. As a child, Holmes enjoyed a reprieve from his turbulent home life when he visited his maternal grandparents, John W. and Bessie (née Gillenwater) Barton. Mary divorced Edgar when Holmes was a toddler and moved with her children to Columbus, where they lived in a low-income housing project with a friend of Mary's and her own two children. The two women worked as clerks and waitresses in order to support their children.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: When Holmes was aged 7, his mother married Harold Bowman on December 31, 1951. Shortly afterward, Holmes and his family moved to the small town of Pataskala, Ohio, about seventeen miles east of Columbus. Holmes recalled that Bowman was a good father until his younger half-brother David was born, at which point Bowman reportedly lost interest in his stepchildren and began neglecting them.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Holmes left home at age 15 and enlisted in the United States Army, with his mother's written permission. He spent most of the three years of his military service in West Germany in the Signal Corps. Upon his honorable discharge in 1963, Holmes moved to Los Angeles, California, where he worked in a variety of jobs, including selling goods door-to-door and tending the vats at a factory. During his stint as an ambulance driver, Holmes met a nurse named Sharon Gebenini in December 1964. They married on August 21, 1965, in Fort Ord, California, after Holmes turned 21.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: In April 1965, Holmes found work as a forklift driver at a meatpacking warehouse in nearby Cudahy. However, repeated exposure to the freezing air in the large walk-in freezer after being outside inhaling the desert-hot air caused him severe health problems, leading to a pneumothorax of his right lung on three occasions during the two years he worked there. Sharon also had health problems, as during the first seventeen months of her marriage to Holmes, she miscarried three separate times.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Holmes began his pornographic movie career in the late 1960s while he was unemployed and recovering from his collapsed lung. He frequented a men's card playing club in Gardena where on one evening, he allegedly met a photographer while standing next to him at a men's room urinal who gave Holmes his business card, telling him that he could find work in the underground adult film business. From 1969, Holmes did nude modeling for underground adult magazines as well as an occasional 'loop' or 'stag film'.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: In 1971, Holmes' career began to take off with an adult film series built around a private investigator named Johnny Wadd, written and directed by Bob Chinn. The success of the film "Johnny Wadd" created an immediate demand for follow-ups, so Chinn followed up the same year with "Flesh of the Lotus." Most of the subsequent Johnny Wadd films were written and directed by Chinn and produced by the Los Angeles-based company Freeway Films.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: With the success of "Deep Throat" (1972), "Behind the Green Door" (1972) and "The Devil in Miss Jones" (1973), porn became chic even though its legality was still hotly contested. Holmes was arrested during this time for pimping and pandering, but he avoided prison time by reputedly becoming an informant for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Holmes' "handler" during his time as an informant was LAPD vice detective Thomas Blake. Of his involvement with Holmes, Blake said, "It was a pleasure working for him."


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: By the late 1970s, Holmes was reputed to be earning as much as $3,000 per day as a porn performer. Around this time, his consumption of cocaine and freebasing were becoming an increasingly serious problem. Professionally, it affected his ability to maintain an erection, as is apparent from his flaccid performance in "Insatiable" (1980). To support himself and his drug habit, Holmes ventured into crime, selling drugs for gangs, prostituting himself to both men and women, as well as committing credit card fraud and various acts of petty theft. In 1976, Holmes met 15-year-old Dawn Schiller, whom he groomed and abused. After he became desperate for money, Holmes forced Schiller into prostitution and often beat her, which he did at least once in public.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: In the 1981 biographical feature documentary "Exhausted: John C. Holmes, The Real Story", from director and Holmes confidante Julia St. Vincent, Holmes claimed during an interview segment that he had had intercourse with over 14,000 women. The number had in fact been invented by Holmes on the spur of the moment to help salvage his waning image. The true number of women (and men) with whom Holmes had sex during his career would never be known. After his death, his ex-wife Sharon claimed to have come across a footlocker, plated in 24k gold leaf, which contained photographic references to Holmes' "private work" and which she burned. Holmes' performances included at least one homosexual feature film, "The Private Pleasures of John C. Holmes" which was filmed in 1983, and a handful of loops which contained anal sex with men.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: In late 1980, a mutual friend introduced Holmes to Chris Coxx, who owned the Odyssey nightclub. In turn, Coxx introduced Holmes to Eddie Nash, a drug dealer who owned several nightclubs, including the Starwood in West Hollywood. At the same time, Holmes was closely associated with the Wonderland Gang, a group of heroin-addicted cocaine dealers, so called for the rowhouse located on Wonderland Avenue in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, out of which they operated. Holmes frequently sold drugs for the gang. Gang members included Ronnie Lee Launius, David Clay Lind, Joy Gold Miller, Billy DeVerell, and their wheel-man, Tracy McCourt.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: After using more than his share of the Wonderland Gang's drugs, Holmes found himself falling out of their favor. In June 1981, Holmes told Launius and Lind about a large stash of drugs, money and jewelry Nash had in his house. Holmes helped to set up a home invasion and armed robbery committed on the morning of June 29, 1981. Although Holmes was not present during the robbery, Nash apparently suspected he had a part in it. After forcing Holmes to confess to his participation and threatening his life and those of his family, Nash dispatched enforcers, accompanied by Holmes, to exact revenge against the Wonderland Gang.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: In the early hours of July 1, 1981, four of the gang's members were found murdered and a fifth severely beaten in their rowhouse. Holmes was allegedly present during the murders and left a left palm print (not "bloody" as Los Angeles media outlets covering the story erroneously reported) over one victim's headboard, but it is unclear whether he participated in the killings. Holmes was questioned but was released due to lack of evidence; he refused to cooperate with the investigation. After spending nearly five months on the run with Schiller, Holmes was arrested in Florida on December 4, 1981, by former LAPD homicide detectives Frank Tomlinson and Tom Lange (who later gained fame for his involvement in the O. J. Simpson murder case). Holmes was extradited to Los Angeles, and in March 1982 was charged with personally committing all four murders. After a three-week trial, Holmes was acquitted of all charges except committing contempt of court on June 26, 1982. The murder trial was a landmark in the history of American trial procedure, as it was the first in which videotape was introduced as evidence.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Holmes' signature asset in the adult film business was his exceptionally large penis. No definitive measurement or documentation verifying his penis' length or girth exists, leaving its exact size unknown. Holmes was uncircumcised.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Veteran porn actress Dorothiea "Seka" Patton has said that Holmes' penis was the biggest in the industry. In the documentary film "Exhausted", she described oral sex with Holmes as similar to fellating a telephone pole. Holmes' first wife recalled his claiming to be when he first measured himself. On another occasion, Holmes claimed his penis was long and in circumference. Holmes' long-time friend and industry associate, Bill Amerson, said, "I saw John measure himself several times; it was thirteen-and-a-half inches [34.3 cm]." In contrast, medical studies of human penis size have consistently found erections average between about five and six inches, with fewer than 0.2% of penises or more.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: So celebrated was the size of Holmes' penis that it was used as a promotional tool for films in which he did not even appear. The film "Anyone But My Husband" ran a promotional tag line of, "Tony 'The Hook' Perez has a dick so big he gives John Holmes a run for his money." At the height of his career, Holmes claimed to have had his penis insured by Lloyd's of London for US$14 million. Holmes reveled in claiming he was insured "for $1 million an inch".


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Another controversy was regarding whether Holmes ever achieved a full erection, although much of his early work clearly revealed he was able to achieve a substantial erection. A popular joke in the 1970s porn industry held that Holmes was incapable of achieving a full erection because the blood flow from his head into his penis would cause him to pass out. Fellow film actress Annette Haven stated that his penis was never particularly hard during intercourse, likening it to "doing it with a big, soft kind-of loofah".


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: After Holmes' death, the length of his penis continued to be used to market Holmes-related material. For example, at the premiere of the film "Wonderland" (2003), patrons were given 13-inch rulers as gag gifts. When Los Angeles-based S&M Bikes debuted its first extra-long bicycle frame for BMX racing in 1989, the new model was dubbed the "Holmes" as a tribute to the actor.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: After his release from Los Angeles County Jail for contempt of court in November 1982, Holmes quickly resumed his film career with a new generation of porn stars. His drug addiction continued off-and-on, and although work was still plentiful, it was no longer as lucrative as it had been with the advent of cheaply made videotapes that saturated the porn market. Most of the adult films and videos he made during the 1980s were little more than cameo appearances.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: In February 1986, five or six months after testing negative, Holmes was diagnosed as HIV-positive. According to his second wife Laurie Holmes, he claimed that he never used hypodermic needles and that he was deathly afraid of them. Gebenini and friend/former colleague Bill Amerson separately confirmed later that Holmes could not have contracted HIV from intravenous drug use because he never used needles.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: During the summer of 1986, Holmes was offered a lucrative deal from Paradise Visuals, which was unaware he was HIV-positive, to travel to Italy to film what were to be his last two pornographic films. Holmes' penultimate film was "The Rise of the Roman Empress" (originally released in Italy as "Carne bollente") for director Riccardo Schicchi. The film starred Holmes, the later Italian Parliament member Ilona "Cicciolina" Staller, Tracey Adams, Christoph Clark, and Amber Lynn. His final film was "The Devil In Mr. Holmes", starring Adams, Lynn, Karin Schubert, and Marina Hedman. These last films created a furor when it was revealed later that Holmes had consciously chosen not to reveal his HIV status to his co-stars before engaging in unprotected sex for the production. Not wanting to reveal the true nature of his failing health, Holmes claimed to the press that he was suffering from colon cancer.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Holmes married Laurie Rose on January 23, 1987, in Las Vegas, Nevada, after confiding to her that he had AIDS. During the last five months of his life, he remained in the VA hospital on Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles. On March 13, 1988, at age 43, Holmes died from AIDS-related complications, which per his death certificate, were described as cardiorespiratory arrest and encephalitis due to AIDS, associated with lymphadenopathy and esophageal candidiasis. His body was cremated, and his widow Laurie and mother Mary scattered his ashes at sea off the coast of Oxnard, California.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Despite Holmes' notoriety and infamy, he devoted significant time to charities involving the environment. He was involved with Greenpeace and was known to campaign and collect door-to-door for charities such as Save the Whales and Save the Seals.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Holmes enjoyed clay sculpting, woodworking, and outdoor activities such as visiting beaches, camping, fishing, and hiking.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: In 1979, along with his younger half-brother David Bowman, Holmes opened a Los Angeles locksmith shop managed by Bowman and an attached used goods store called The Just Looking Emporium, named by Gebinini and managed by Schiller. However, because of Holmes' escalating drug addiction, which distracted him from buying inventory for the Emporium and siphoned its working capital, the Emporium "close[d] its doors forever by the end of September 1980". According to Schiller, "David [kept] his part of the business open while John remove[d] our inventory and [sold] it all for coke."


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Later, after Holmes' acquittal, he and Amerson founded and operated Penguin Productions, where Holmes could be a triple-threat: writing, directing and performing. Holmes appeared in seven of Penguin's twenty productions between 1985 and 1988. After requesting permission to use the name "Johnny Wadd" from his old director and friend Bob Chinn, Holmes reprised the role for Penguin's "The Return of Johnny Wadd" (1986) – one of his last films.


title: John Holmes (actor)

text: Holmes' career was promoted with a series of outrageous claims that he made over the years (many made up on the spur of the moment by Holmes himself). The most dubious ones include:


title: Drag queen

text: A drag queen is a person, usually male, who uses drag clothing and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate female gender signifiers and gender roles for entertainment purposes. Historically, drag queens have usually been gay men, and part of gay culture.


title: Drag queen

text: People partake in the activity of "doing drag" for reasons ranging from self-expression to mainstream performance. Drag shows frequently include lip-syncing, live singing, and dancing. They occur at events like LGBT pride parades, carnivals and drag pageants and in venues such as cabarets and nightclubs. Drag queens vary by type, culture, and dedication, from professionals who star in films and spend a lot of their time in their drag persona, to people who do drag only occasionally.


title: Drag queen

text: Those who do occasional drag may be from other backgrounds than the LGBT community. There is a long history of folkloric and theatrical crossdressing that involves people of all orientations. Not everyone who does drag at some point in their lives is a drag queen.


title: Drag queen

text: The origin of the term "drag" is uncertain; the first recorded use of "drag" in reference to actors dressed in women's clothing is from 1870. It may have been based on the term "grand rag" which was historically used for a masquerade ball.


title: Drag queen

text: In 1971, an article in Lee Brewster's "Drag Queens" magazine describes a drag queen as a "homosexual tranvestite" who is hyperfeminine, flamboyant, and militant. Drag queens are further described as having an attitude of superiority, and being commonly courted by heterosexual men who would "not ordinarily participate in homosexual relationships". The term "drag queen" implied "homosexual transvestite", but the term "drag" carried no such connotations. In the 1970's, "drag queen" is again defined as a "homosexual transvestite". "Drag" is parsed as changing one's clothes to those of a different sex, while "queen" is said to refer to a homosexual man.


title: Drag queen

text: For much of history, drag queens were men, but in more modern times, cisgender and trans women, as well as non-binary people, also perform as drag queens. In a 2018 article, "Psychology Today" stated that drag queens are "most typically gay cisgender men (though there are many drag queens of varying sexual orientations and gender identities)". Examples of trans-feminine drag queens, sometimes called "trans queens", include Monica Beverly Hillz and Peppermint. Cisgender female drag queens are sometimes called "faux queens" or "bioqueens", though critics of this practice assert that "faux" carries the connotation that the drag is fake, and that the use of "bioqueen" exclusively for cisgender females is a misnomer since trans-feminine queens exhibit gynomorphic features. Drag queens' counterparts are drag kings: performers, usually women, who dress in exaggeratedly masculine clothing. Examples of drag kings include Landon Cider. Trans men who dress like drag kings are sometimes termed trans kings. Drag has been argued to be an over-expression of the stereotypical female look. Drag is known to break down gender norms and can thus be seen as 'gender bending'.


title: Drag queen

text: The term "female impersonator" was commonly used in the past. In 1972, Esther Newton described a "female impersonator" as a "professional drag queen". She considered the term "female impersonator" to be the one that was (then) widely understood by heterosexual audiences.


title: Drag queen

text: Female impersonation can be traced back at least as far as ancient Greece. There was little to no gender equity then and women held a lower social status. This meant male actors would play female roles during theatrical performances. This tradition continued for centuries but began to be less prevalent as motion pictures became popular. During the era of vaudeville it was considered immodest for women to appear on stage. Due to that circumstance, some men became famous as "female impersonators", the most notable being Julian Eltinge. At the peak of his career he was one of the most sought after and highest paid actors in the world.


title: Drag queen

text: Female impersonation has been and continues to be illegal in some places, which inspired the drag queen José Sarria to hand out labels to his friends reading, "I am a boy", so they could not be accused of female impersonation. American drag queen RuPaul once said, "I do not impersonate females! How many women do you know who wear seven-inch heels, four-foot wigs, and skintight dresses?" He also said, "I don't dress like a woman; I dress like a drag queen!"


title: Drag queen

text: Some drag queens may prefer to be referred to as "she" while in drag and desire to stay completely in character. Other drag performers, like RuPaul, seem to be completely indifferent to which pronoun is used to refer to them. In his words, "You can call me he. You can call me she. You can call me Regis and Kathie Lee; I don't care! Just so long as you call me."


title: Drag queen

text: Drag queens are sometimes called transvestites, although that term also has many other connotations than the term "drag queen" and is not much favored by many drag queens themselves. The term "tranny," an abbreviation of the term transvestite, has been adopted by some drag performers, notably RuPaul, and the gay male community in the United States, but it is considered offensive to most transgender and transsexual people. The word "tranny" is seen as a slur, thus the use of the word is often just used by drag queens themselves as a way to reclaim it.


title: Drag queen

text: Many drag performers refer to themselves as drag artists, as opposed to drag queens, as some contemporary forms of drag have become nonbinary.


title: Drag queen

text: In the drag queen world today, there is an ongoing debate about whether transgender drag queens are actually considered "Drag Queens". Some argue that, because a drag queen is defined as a man portraying a woman, transgender women cannot be drag queens. Drag kings are women who assume a masculine aesthetic. However this is not always the case, because there are also biokings, bio-queens, and female queens, which are people who perform their own biological sex through a heightened or exaggerated gender presentation.


title: Drag queen

text: The concept of drag could be considered seen in the earliest forms of entertainment, including Ancient Greek Theatre. In ancient western cultures, women often were not allowed to perform onstage or become actors, therefore male actors played the roles of women also. This demonstrates how female impersonation can be traced back to the earliest forms of entertainment and spectacle. Not only this, but men and boys were expected to dress as women, or in drag, for many religious ceremonies and rituals in Ancient Greece.


title: Drag queen

text: There is some controversy as to whether this is actually drag rather than cross-dressing and if it's then that it emerged, or if it occurred later in history in the 1800s with forms of entertainment such as minstrel shows and plays, as they often incorporated male actors as exaggerated female impersonators.


title: Drag queen

text: In the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, pantomime dames became a popular form of female impersonation in Europe. This was the first era of female impersonation in Europe to use comedy as part of the performance, contrasting with the serious Shakespearean tragedies and Italian operas. The dame became a stock character with a range of attitudes from "charwoman" to "grande dame" that mainly was used for improvisation. The most famous and successful pantomime dame was Dan Leno. After World War I and World War II, the theatre and movie scenes were changing, and the use of pantomime dames declined.


title: Drag queen

text: Beyond theatre, in the 1800s, Molly houses became a place for gay men to meet, often dressed in drag. Despite gayness being outlawed, men would dress in women's clothing an attend these taverns and coffee houses to congregate and meet with other queer people (mostly gay men).


title: Drag queen

text: Drag in South Africa emerged in the 1950s in major cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town. It started in the form of underground pageants which created a safe space for members of the LGBTQ community in Apartheid South Africa, where people could be punished by law for being gay. Being gay wasn't legalized in South Africa until 1998, so pageants, such as the famous Miss Gay Western Cape, did not become official until the late 1990s.


title: Drag queen

text: Today, homophobia is still incredibly rampant in South Africa, and drag queens face the threat of violence by being openly gay. Furthermore, there isn't even the right language to explore queerness as there is no word for it in Xhosa, the indigenous language.


title: Drag queen

text: After homosexual acts were decriminalized in Thailand in 1956, gay clubs and other queer spaces began opening which lead to the first cabaret. However, drag in Thailand was actually heavily influenced by drag queens from the Philippines as the first drag show started after the owner of a gay club saw drag queens from the Philippines perform in Bangkok. Therefore, drag shows started in Thailand in the mid 1970s and have become increasingly popular over time, especially in major cities like Bangkok.


title: Drag queen

text: Before being colonized by Spain in the mid 1500s, it was The Philippines a national custom for men to dress in women's clothing. However, when the Spaniards arrived, they not only outlawed homosexuality but executed men that appeared to be homosexual. Spain cast a culture of Machismo onto the Philippines, causing any kind of queerness and queer culture to be heavily suppressed.


title: Drag queen

text: Nonetheless, in the early 1900s drag started to reappear in the media. Drag became a key element of national pantomime theatre and as time went on, drag queens appeared in other forms of theatre and in movies.


title: Drag queen

text: In the 1940s John Herbert, who sometimes competed in drag pageants, was the victim of an attempted robbery while he was dressed as a woman. His assailants falsely claimed that Herbert had solicited them for sex, and Herbert was accused and convicted of indecency under Canada's same-sex sexual activity law (which was not repealed until 1969). After being convicted, Herbert served time in a youth reformatory in Guelph, Ontario. Herbert later served another sentence for indecency at reformatory in Mimico. Herbert wrote "Fortune and Men's Eyes" in 1964 based on his time behind bars. He included the character of Queenie as an authorial self-insertion.


title: Drag queen

text: In 1973 the first Canadian play about and starring a drag queen, "Hosanna" by Michel Tremblay, was performed at Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal.


title: Drag queen

text: In 1977 the Canadian film "Outrageous!", starring drag queen Craig Russell, became one of the first gay-themed films to break out into mainstream theatrical release.


title: Drag queen

text: In 1980, for the first time, a police presence protected gay spectators and drag queens from anti-gay harassment at the annual Hallowe'en show at Toronto's St. Charles Tavern.


title: Drag queen

text: On 6 September 2018, the Supreme Court of India ruled that the application of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code to consensual homosexual sex between adults was unconstitutional, "irrational, indefensible and manifestly arbitrary". Since then, drag culture in India has been growing and becoming the mainstream art culture. The hotel chain of Lalit Groups spaced a franchise of clubs where drag performances are hosted in major cities of India such as Mumbai, Delhi and Banglore. Maya the drag queen, Rani Kohinoor (Sushant Divgikar), Lush Monsoon, Betta Naan Stop, Tropical Marca, Zeeshan Ali and Patruni Sastry are some of the Indian drag artists. In 2018, Hyderabad had its first Drag Con. In 2020, India's First Drag specific Magazine Dragvanti was started.


title: Drag queen

text: The first person known to describe himself as "the queen of drag" was William Dorsey Swann, born enslaved in Hancock, Maryland, who in the 1880s started hosting drag balls in Washington, DC attended by other men who were formerly enslaved, and often raided by the police, as documented in the newspapers. In 1896, Swann was convicted and sentenced to 10 months in jail on the false charge of "keeping a disorderly house" (euphemism for running a brothel) and requested a pardon from the president for holding a drag ball (the request was denied).


title: Drag queen

text: The evolution of drag in the United States was influenced by the phenomenon of the minstrel show. These shows were an example of how Blackface was used in a racist form of entertainment where the performers would mock African American men, but as time went on they found it amusing to mock African American women as well. They performed in comedic skits, dances, and "wench" songs. Black people themselves were excluded from being performers as at this point in history, Black people were still enslaved in the United States. Black face in minstrel shows emerged in circa 1820, but became more established with the creation of the character of "Jim Crow", which was first performed in 1828. After the Civil War, performance troupes began to be composed of Black performers. The shows maintained popularity in American entertainment into the 1920s.


title: Drag queen

text: The broad comedic stylings of the minstrel shows helped develop the vaudeville shows of the late 1800s to the early 1900s. In addition to the "wench players", minstrel shows developed the role of "prima donnas", who appeared more elegant and refined while still retaining their comedic elements. While the "wenches" were purely American creations, the "prima donnas" were inspired by both American and European cross-dressing shows, like Shakespearean actors and castrati. With the United States shifting demographics, including the shift from farms to cities, Great Migration of African Americans, and an influx of immigrants, vaudeville's broad comedy and music expanded the audience from minstrelsy.


title: Drag queen

text: With vaudeville becoming more popular, it allowed female impersonators to become popular as well. Many female impersonators started with low comedy in vaudeville and worked their way up to perform as the prima donna. They were known to perform song and dance routines with multiple outfit changes. In New York City, famous female impersonator Julian Eltinge found success, and he eventually made his way to the Broadway stage performing as a woman. He published a magazine, "Magazine and Beauty Hints" (1913), which provided beauty and fashion tips, and he posed for corset and cosmetics advertisements. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Bothwell Browne was the top female impersonator of the West Coast. He performed at the Grand Opera House and Central Theater, among other venues, went on tour with United Vaudeville, and later appeared in the film Yankee Doodle in Berlin (1919), produced by Mack Sennett.


title: Drag queen

text: At this time being a female impersonator was seen as something for the straight white male, and any deviation was punished. Connection with sex work and homosexuality eventually led to the decline of vaudeville during the Progressive Era. Both the minstrelsy and vaudeville eras of female impersonation led to an association with music, dance, and comedy that still lasts today.


title: Drag queen

text: In the early to mid-1900s, female impersonation had become tied to the LGBT community and thus criminality, so it had to change forms and locations. It moved from being popular mainstream entertainment to something done only at night in disreputable areas, such as San Francisco's Tenderloin. Here female impersonation started to evolve into what we today know as drag and drag queens. Drag queens such as José Sarria and Aleshia Brevard first came to prominence in these clubs. People went to these nightclubs to play with the boundaries of gender and sexuality and it became a place for the LGBT community, especially gay men, to feel accepted. As LGBT culture has slowly become more accepted in American society, drag has also become more, though not totally, acceptable in today's society. In the 1940s and 1950s, Arthur Blake was one of the few female impersonators to be successful in both gay and mainstream entertainment, becoming famous for his impersonations of Bette Davis, Carmen Miranda, and Eleanor Roosevelt in night clubs. At the invitation of the Roosevelts, he performed his impersonation of Eleanor at the White House. He also impersonated Davis and Miranda in the 1952 film "Diplomatic Courier".


title: Drag queen

text: The Cooper Donuts Riot was a May 1959 incident in Los Angeles in which drag queens, lesbians, transgender women, and gay men rioted; it was one of the first LGBT protests in the United States.


title: Drag queen

text: The Compton's Cafeteria riot, which involved drag queens and others, occurred in San Francisco in 1966. It marked the beginning of transgender activism in San Francisco.


title: Drag queen

text: On 17 March 1968, in Los Angeles, to protest entrapment and harassment by the LAPD, two drag queens known as "The Princess" and "The Duchess" held a St. Patrick's Day party at Griffith Park, a popular cruising spot and a frequent target of police activity. More than 200 gay men socialized through the day.


title: Drag queen

text: Drag queens were also involved in the Stonewall riots, a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the LGBT community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of 28 June 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The riots are widely considered to be the catalyst for the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for LGBT rights in the United States.


title: Drag queen

text: During the summer of 1976, a restaurant in Fire Island Pines, New York, denied entry to a visitor in drag named Terry Warren. When Warren's friends in Cherry Grove heard what had happened, they dressed up in drag, and, on 4 July 1976, sailed to the Pines by water taxi. This turned into a yearly event where drag queens go to the Pines, called the Invasion of the Pines.


title: Drag queen

text: Drag families are a part of ball culture and drag 'houses"." In ball culture, drag queens usually all share the same last name of the drag house or drag family they belong to. Members of a drag house may live together, but are called families because of the values of support and community in drag culture. It is also rooted in the concept of 'chosen family' as queer people have been historically disowned or outcast by their relatives and so find love and camaraderie in the LGBTQ+ community, which is especially true for those in the drag community.


title: Drag queen

text: A drag queen may either pick a drag name, or be given it by a friend or a"drag mother". Drag mothers often come to lead their drag house, or start their own, and are more experienced and acclaimed members of the drag community. As such, drag mothers and drag daughters have a mentor-apprentice relationship. This is because drag mothers help hone the skills of their younger queens, or drag daughters, by teaching them things such as how to apply makeup, walk in heels, sew clothing, dance, sing etc. In addition to this, drag mothers also promote their drag children at events and performances.


title: Drag queen

text: The process of getting into drag or into character can take hours. A drag queen may aim for a certain style, celebrity impression, or message with their look. Hair, make-up, and costumes are the most important essentials for drag queens. Drag queens tend to go for a more exaggerated look with a lot more makeup than a typical woman would wear.


title: Drag queen

text: Some people do drag simply as a means of self-expression, but often drag queens (once they have completed a look) will go out to clubs and bars and perform in a "drag show." Many drag queens dress up for money by doing different shows, but there are also drag queens that have full-time jobs but still enjoy dressing up in drag as a hobby.


title: Drag queen

text: Many parts of the drag show, and of the drag queens' other intellectual properties, cannot be protected by intellectual property law. To substitute the lack of legal protection, drag queens revert to social norms in order to protect their intellectual property.


title: Drag queen

text: A drag show is a piece of entertainment consisting of a variety of songs, monologues or skits featuring either single performers or groups of performers in drag meant to entertain an audience. They range from amateur performances at small bars to elaborately staged theatrical presentations. Many drag shows feature performers singing or lip-synching to songs while performing a pre-planned pantomime, or dancing. The performers often don elaborate costumes and makeup, and sometimes dress to imitate various famous female singers or personalities. Some events are centered around drag, such as Southern Decadence where the majority of festivities are led by the Grand Marshals, who are traditionally drag queens.


title: Drag queen

text: In 2020 the first West End play to feature an all drag cast, "Death Drop," launched at the Garrick Theatre in London. Produced by Tuckshop and Trafalgar Entertainment it was written by drag performer Holly Stars and starred Courtney Act, Monet X Change, Latrice Royale, Willam, Holly Stars, Anna Phylactic, LoUis CYfer, Don One, Kemah Bob, Myra Dubois and Vinegar Strokes and was directed by Jesse Jones. The show ran for a number of weeks in November and December 2020 before being closed due to a COVID lockdown in London. The show reopened on 19 May 2021 and ran until its scheduled end date of 11 July 2021. "Death Drop" received 5-star reviews from many publications including Gay Times and Attitude magazine and was widely celebrated for breaking new ground in theatrical drag performance.


title: Drag queen

text: As drag is such a prominent element in theatre, it makes sense that drag also entered the world of movies. Below is a list of movies about drag, or featuring drag.


title: Drag queen

text: While some male music celebrities wear exaggerated feminine clothing as part of their show, they are not necessarily drag queens. For example, Boy George wears drag queen style clothes and cosmetics but he once stated he was not a drag queen. However, RuPaul is a professional drag queen performer and singer.


title: Drag queen

text: Drag queen Don McLean (drag name Lori Shannon) appeared in three episodes of the CBS sitcom "All in the Family" as drag queen Beverly LaSalle: "Archie the Hero" (1975), in which Archie Bunker gives her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, not realizing she is male; "Beverly Rides Again" (1976), in which Archie uses her to play a practical joke on a friend; and "Edith's Crisis of Faith, Part 1" (1977), in which her murder leads Edith Bunker to question her faith in God. The role was noteworthy for its uncommonly respectful and sympathetic treatment of Beverly as a "transvestite".


title: Drag queen

text: "CODCO" was a Canadian sketch comedy series which aired on CBC Television from 1988 to 1993; two of its actors, Tommy Sexton and Greg Malone, were especially renowned for drag-based impersonations of celebrity women such as Queen Elizabeth, Barbara Frum, Barbara Walters, Tammy Faye Bakker and Margaret Thatcher. In one famous sketch, Malone as Frum moderated a debate between Andy Jones as a gay teacher who had been fired from his job for testing HIV-positive and Sexton as Clarabelle Otterhead, the president of an anti-gay lobby group called Citizens Outraged by Weird Sex (or COWS).


title: Drag queen

text: In mid-2008, RuPaul began producing "RuPaul's Drag Race", a reality television game show which began airing in February 2009. The premise of the program has several drag queens compete to be selected by RuPaul and a panel of judges as "America's next drag superstar". It inspired the similar spin-off shows "RuPaul's Drag U" and "", as well as the international franchise editions "Drag Race Thailand", "The Switch Drag Race" (Chile), "RuPaul's Drag Race UK", "Canada's Drag Race", "Drag Race Holland", "Drag Race España" and "RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under".


title: Drag queen

text: In 2018, "American Idol" featured a drag queen, Adam Sanders (drag name Ada Vox) as one of its contestants. He made it to the top ten.


title: Drag queen

text: In 2018, "Celebrity Big Brother" featured Queen Shane Jenek (drag name Courtney Act) as one of its contestants, placing first in the season with 49.43% of the public vote.


title: Drag queen

text: Also in 2018, "So You Think You Can Dance" featured Jay Jackson (drag name Laganja Estranja) as one of its contestants.


title: Drag queen

text: The Netflix show "Dancing Queen", also released in 2018, starred Justin Johnson (drag name Alyssa Edwards) and his dance studio, Beyond Belief Dance Company.


title: Drag queen

text: A 2018 episode of "The Simpsons," titled "Werking Mom", featured many drag queens, including cameos from RuPaul and Raja (the season three winner of "RuPaul's Drag Race").


title: Drag queen

text: "Dragnificent!" is a television series on the American network TLC. The show started as a special branded as Drag Me Down the Aisle which aired on 9 March 2019. It features Alexis Michelle, BeBe Zahara Benet, Jujubee, and Thorgy Thor, four drag queens who are all "RuPaul's Drag Race" alumnae, helping an engaged woman to plan her upcoming wedding. On 15 January 2020, TLC announced that it had given a full season run to "Dragnificent!", a new show to be based on the "Drag Me Down the Aisle" special. The series premiered on 19 April 2020.


title: Drag queen

text: The Netflix show "AJ and the Queen", released in 2020, followed "Ruby Red, a bigger-than-life but down-on-her-luck drag queen [played by RuPaul] who travels across America from club to club in a rundown 1990s R/V with her unlikely sidekick AJ, a recently orphaned, tough-talking, scrappy ten-year-old stowaway. As the two misfits travel from city to city, Ruby's message of love and acceptance winds up touching people and changing their lives for the better."


title: Drag queen

text: In 2020 RuPaul became the first drag queen to host "Saturday Night Live," though he was not in drag at the time.


title: Drag queen

text: In 2020-21 British drag queen Holly Stars wrote and performed in two seasons of a mockumentary series, "Holly Stars: Inspirational," broadcast on OutTV, Froot TV and Amazon Prime.


title: Drag queen

text: While drag queens are entertainers, they play a role in educating people on gender roles and stereotyping. Professor Stephen Schacht of Plattsburgh State University of New York began introducing his and his students' experiences of attending a drag show to his gender/sexualities class to challenge his students' ideas of dichotomy. Over time he began inviting students to attend with him. He gathered from his students that after attending the drag show they had a new appreciation for gender and sexuality and often become very vocal about their new experiences in the classroom.


title: Drag queen

text: Nina West, "Drag Race" season eleven contestant and winner of "Miss Congeniality", and producer of "Drag Is Magic", an EP of children's music about the art form, says she hopes to inspire them to "dream big, be kind, and be their perfect selves." West feels the art form is "an opportunity for children to get creative and think outside the boxes us silly adults have crafted for them." Marti Gould Cummings said something similar when a video of them performing "Baby Shark" at a drag brunch event went viral. "Anyone who thinks drag isn't for children is wrong," said Cummings, "Drag is expression, and children are such judgment-free beings; they don't really care what you're wearing, just what you're performing." As of May 2019, the video has been viewed over 806,000 times.


title: Drag queen

text: West responded to critics who question if children are too young to experience drag, saying "Drag is an opportunity for anyone – including and especially children – to reconsider the masks we are all forced to wear daily." West added, "Children are inundated with implicit imagery from media about what is 'boy' and what is 'girl.' And I believe that almost all kids are really less concerned about playing with a toy that's supposedly aligned to their gender, and more concerned with playing with toys that speak to them."


title: Drag queen

text: However, as of 2022, exposing kids to drag has become somewhat controversial. Lawmakers in states such has Florida, Arizona, Texas are attempting to ban minors from attending drag shows and punish parents who expose their kids to drag. These attempts to ban minors from watching drag are based on allegations of drag being a form of perversion and hyper-sexualization. Those who disagree have argued that drag queens provide a safe and creative environment for young children, especially LGBTQ+ children, and are a source of both education and entertainment.


title: Drag queen

text: In December 2015, Radar Productions and Michelle Tea developed the concept of Drag Queen Story Hour. Launched at the San Francisco Public Library, Drag Queen Story Hour was adopted by the Brooklyn Public Library in the summer of 2016, and has since traveled to various libraries, museums, bookstores, and recreation centers, and parks across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Such events sometimes prompt opposition against the libraries and organizers.


title: Drag queen

text: An event in recent news in the state of California details the invasion of a drag story time event with children by men belonging to the far-right group known as Proud Boys. The County Sheriff's Office opened a hate crime investigation into the incident after homophobic and transphobic statements were made, endangering both the drag queen reading to the children, and the children themselves.


title: Drag queen

text: Separately from kids watching drag, the phenomena of drag kids is relatively recent, "The New York Times" notes that as of September 2019 there are over a hundred public drag children in the U.S., with Desmond is Amazing as the one with the most followers. The mainstream access to drag queens on television exponentially increased in 2009 when "RuPaul's Drag Race s"tarted airing.


title: Drag queen

text: Drag has come to be a celebrated and important aspect of modern gay life, but has also been criticized for degrading women. Many gay bars and clubs around the world hold drag shows as regular events or for special parties. Several "International Drag Day" holidays have been started over the years to promote the shows. In the United States Drag Day is typically celebrated in early March.


title: Drag queen

text: A televised drag competition, "RuPaul's Drag Race", is the most successful program on the Logo television network. In 2016, the show won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program. In 2018, the show became the first show to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program in the same year.


title: Drag queen

text: RuPaul received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the television industry on 16 March 2018, making him the first drag queen to be given such an award.


title: Carbohydrate

text: In organic chemistry, a carbohydrate () is a biomolecule consisting of carbon (C), hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) atoms, usually with a hydrogen–oxygen atom ratio of 2:1 (as in water) and thus with the empirical formula (where "m" may or may not be different from "n"), which does not mean the H has covalent bonds with O (for example with , H has a covalent bond with C but not with O). However, not all carbohydrates conform to this precise stoichiometric definition (e.g., uronic acids, deoxy-sugars such as fucose), nor are all chemicals that do conform to this definition automatically classified as carbohydrates (e.g. formaldehyde and acetic acid).


title: Carbohydrate

text: The term is most common in biochemistry, where it is a synonym of saccharide (), a group that includes sugars, starch, and cellulose. The saccharides are divided into four chemical groups: monosaccharides, disaccharides, oligosaccharides, and polysaccharides. Monosaccharides and disaccharides, the smallest (lower molecular weight) carbohydrates, are commonly referred to as sugars. While the scientific nomenclature of carbohydrates is complex, the names of the monosaccharides and disaccharides very often end in the suffix "-ose", which was originally taken from the word glucose (), and is used for almost all sugars, e.g. fructose (fruit sugar), sucrose (cane or beet sugar), ribose, lactose (milk sugar), etc.


title: Carbohydrate

text: Carbohydrates perform numerous roles in living organisms. Polysaccharides serve as an energy store (e.g. starch and glycogen) and as structural components (e.g. cellulose in plants and chitin in arthropods). The 5-carbon monosaccharide ribose is an important component of coenzymes (e.g. ATP, FAD and NAD) and the backbone of the genetic molecule known as RNA. The related deoxyribose is a component of DNA. Saccharides and their derivatives include many other important biomolecules that play key roles in the immune system, fertilization, preventing pathogenesis, blood clotting, and development.


title: Carbohydrate

text: Carbohydrates are central to nutrition and are found in a wide variety of natural and processed foods. Starch is a polysaccharide and is abundant in cereals (wheat, maize, rice), potatoes, and processed food based on cereal flour, such as bread, pizza or pasta. Sugars appear in human diet mainly as table sugar (sucrose, extracted from sugarcane or sugar beets), lactose (abundant in milk), glucose and fructose, both of which occur naturally in honey, many fruits, and some vegetables. Table sugar, milk, or honey are often added to drinks and many prepared foods such as jam, biscuits and cakes.


title: Carbohydrate

text: Cellulose, a polysaccharide found in the cell walls of all plants, is one of the main components of insoluble dietary fiber. Although it is not digestible by humans, cellulose and insoluble dietary fiber generally help maintain a healthy digestive system by facilitating bowel movements. Other polysaccharides contained in dietary fiber include resistant starch and inulin, which feed some bacteria in the microbiota of the large intestine, and are metabolized by these bacteria to yield short-chain fatty acids.


title: Carbohydrate

text: In scientific literature, the term "carbohydrate" has many synonyms, like "sugar" (in the broad sense), "saccharide", "ose", "glucide", "hydrate of carbon" or "polyhydroxy compounds with aldehyde or ketone". Some of these terms, specially "carbohydrate" and "sugar", are also used with other meanings.


title: Carbohydrate

text: In food science and in many informal contexts, the term "carbohydrate" often means any food that is particularly rich in the complex carbohydrate starch (such as cereals, bread and pasta) or simple carbohydrates, such as sugar (found in candy, jams, and desserts). This informality is sometimes confusing since it confounds chemical structure and digestibility in humans.


title: Carbohydrate

text: Often in lists of nutritional information, such as the USDA National Nutrient Database, the term "carbohydrate" (or "carbohydrate by difference") is used for everything other than water, protein, fat, ash, and ethanol. This includes chemical compounds such as acetic or lactic acid, which are not normally considered carbohydrates. It also includes dietary fiber which is a carbohydrate but which does not contribute food energy (kilocalories) in humans, even though it is often included in the calculation of total food energy just as though it did (i.e., as if it were a digestible and absorbable carbohydrate such as a sugar).


title: Carbohydrate

text: In the strict sense, "sugar" is applied for sweet, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in human food.


title: Carbohydrate

text: Formerly the name "carbohydrate" was used in chemistry for any compound with the formula C (HO). Following this definition, some chemists considered formaldehyde (CHO) to be the simplest carbohydrate, while others claimed that title for glycolaldehyde. Today, the term is generally understood in the biochemistry sense, which excludes compounds with only one or two carbons and includes many biological carbohydrates which deviate from this formula. For example, while the above representative formulas would seem to capture the commonly known carbohydrates, ubiquitous and abundant carbohydrates often deviate from this. For example, carbohydrates often display chemical groups such as: "N"-acetyl (e.g. chitin), sulfate (e.g. glycosaminoglycans), carboxylic acid and deoxy modifications (e.g. fucose and sialic acid).


title: Carbohydrate

text: Natural saccharides are generally built of simple carbohydrates called monosaccharides with general formula (CHO) where "n" is three or more. A typical monosaccharide has the structure H–(CHOH)(C=O)–(CHOH)–H, that is, an aldehyde or ketone with many hydroxyl groups added, usually one on each carbon atom that is not part of the aldehyde or ketone functional group. Examples of monosaccharides are glucose, fructose, and glyceraldehydes. However, some biological substances commonly called "monosaccharides" do not conform to this formula (e.g. uronic acids and deoxy-sugars such as fucose) and there are many chemicals that do conform to this formula but are not considered to be monosaccharides (e.g. formaldehyde CHO and inositol (CHO)).


title: Carbohydrate

text: The open-chain form of a monosaccharide often coexists with a closed ring form where the aldehyde/ketone carbonyl group carbon (C=O) and hydroxyl group (–OH) react forming a hemiacetal with a new C–O–C bridge.


title: Carbohydrate

text: Monosaccharides can be linked together into what are called polysaccharides (or oligosaccharides) in a large variety of ways. Many carbohydrates contain one or more modified monosaccharide units that have had one or more groups replaced or removed. For example, deoxyribose, a component of DNA, is a modified version of ribose; chitin is composed of repeating units of N-acetyl glucosamine, a nitrogen-containing form of glucose.


title: Carbohydrate

text: Carbohydrates are polyhydroxy aldehydes, ketones, alcohols, acids, their simple derivatives and their polymers having linkages of the acetal type. They may be classified according to their degree of polymerization, and may be divided initially into three principal groups, namely sugars, oligosaccharides and polysaccharides.


title: Carbohydrate

text: Monosaccharides are the simplest carbohydrates in that they cannot be hydrolyzed to smaller carbohydrates. They are aldehydes or ketones with two or more hydroxyl groups. The general chemical formula of an unmodified monosaccharide is (C•HO), literally a "carbon hydrate". Monosaccharides are important fuel molecules as well as building blocks for nucleic acids. The smallest monosaccharides, for which n=3, are dihydroxyacetone and D- and L-glyceraldehydes.


title: Carbohydrate

text: Monosaccharides are classified according to three different characteristics: the placement of its carbonyl group, the number of carbon atoms it contains, and its chiral handedness. If the carbonyl group is an aldehyde, the monosaccharide is an aldose; if the carbonyl group is a ketone, the monosaccharide is a ketose. Monosaccharides with three carbon atoms are called trioses, those with four are called tetroses, five are called pentoses, six are hexoses, and so on. These two systems of classification are often combined. For example, glucose is an aldohexose (a six-carbon aldehyde), ribose is an aldopentose (a five-carbon aldehyde), and fructose is a ketohexose (a six-carbon ketone).


title: Carbohydrate

text: Each carbon atom bearing a hydroxyl group (-OH), with the exception of the first and last carbons, are asymmetric, making them stereo centers with two possible configurations each (R or S). Because of this asymmetry, a number of isomers may exist for any given monosaccharide formula. Using Le Bel-van't Hoff rule, the aldohexose D-glucose, for example, has the formula (C·HO), of which four of its six carbons atoms are stereogenic, making D-glucose one of 2=16 possible stereoisomers. In the case of glyceraldehydes, an aldotriose, there is one pair of possible stereoisomers, which are enantiomers and epimers. 1, 3-dihydroxyacetone, the ketose corresponding to the aldose glyceraldehydes, is a symmetric molecule with no stereo centers. The assignment of D or L is made according to the orientation of the asymmetric carbon furthest from the carbonyl group: in a standard Fischer projection if the hydroxyl group is on the right the molecule is a D sugar, otherwise it is an L sugar. The "D-" and "L-" prefixes should not be confused with "d-" or "l-", which indicate the direction that the sugar rotates plane polarized light. This usage of "d-" and "l-" is no longer followed in carbohydrate chemistry.