An old cathedral city in the south of England, about an hour by train from London, and the name attached to several things because of it. The city itself matters historically: in the 800s and 900s, under King Alfred and the kings after him, Winchester was effectively the capital of England, before power moved to London. It has a very large medieval cathedral, one of the longest in Europe, where the writer Jane Austen is buried, and it is home to Winchester College, one of the oldest and most expensive private schools in the country (confusingly, the English call such schools 'public schools'). Today it is a small, wealthy, pretty place — the kind of town English people call 'historic', full of tourists and tea shops. The name is used in other ways too, and these have separate stories. A Winchester rifle is a famous American gun of the 1800s, named after the businessman Oliver Winchester, not after the English city; it appears constantly in cowboy films. A 'Winchester' can also mean a large glass bottle used in laboratories, named from an old English measure of volume. And in computing, an early type of hard disk was nicknamed a Winchester, borrowed from the rifle. Someone from the city is called a Wintonian, from the old Latin name — but that word is rare and you will not need it.