Hail
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Hail. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
pellets of ice falling in showers. A hailstone consists usually of a core of forms the Republic of Santo Domingo , or the Dominican Republic , as it is sometimes called. The western or French end is known as the Republic of Haiti. The prevailing religion all over the island is Catholic. Naturally we should expect to see Haiti under one government, but the prevailing language of the east is Spanish; and that of the west, French. It has thus far been impossible for the two little republics to harmonize under one government. During the administration of President Grant a treaty was negotiated for taking over the control of the Spanish end of the island, but it was defeated in the United States Senate. The finances of the island are not in good shape. Many believe that it will be necessary for the United States to interfere in the interest of honesty and order. The population in 1909 of Haiti was estimated at 1,500,000; that of Santo Domingo at 600,000.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the fall of aërial moisture in the form of ice. Hail occurs in two unlike forms, of different origin, which are now distinguished as hard, or true hail, and soft hail. The latter, often also known as sleet, denotes the fine, light rains that frequently fall in winter, rarely in summer, and seem an accompaniment of snow. True hail occurs in hard, compact, irregular masses of ice, either clear or opaque, both kinds often occurring in alternate layers in a hailstone.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 could describe hail's layered structure but not explain it; the mechanism only became clear once aircraft, weather radar and, from the 1950s, Doppler radar let meteorologists watch the powerful updrafts inside cumulonimbus clouds that suspend growing stones until they are too heavy to hold. Collier's lumped "soft hail" together with sleet; modern practice separates graupel (soft rime-coated pellets) from sleet or ice pellets, which are refrozen raindrops, and neither counts as true hail. Researchers also abandoned the tidy old idea that each layer marks one trip up and down the cloud: stones follow irregular paths, and layers reflect wet and dry growth at different temperatures. Attempts to suppress hail by cloud seeding, tested in the US National Hail Research Experiment of the 1970s, produced no convincing benefit, and the largest US hailstone on record fell at Vivian, South Dakota in 2010, about 8 inches across.
Written for this edition, 2026.