Arsenal

How to spell arsenal

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce arsenal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does arsenal mean?

1. nounA store or collection of weapons and military equipment, or the place where they are made or kept.
2. nounA useful collection of resources, skills, or methods available for a particular purpose.

Arsenal in a sentence

• The country maintains a vast nuclear arsenal at several secret sites.

• Patience and humour are the most valuable tools in her teaching arsenal.

• Police discovered a hidden arsenal of rifles and ammunition in the basement.

• The lawyer brought a full arsenal of arguments to the hearing.

Where does arsenal come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

Arsenal traces back to the Arabic phrase dar as-sina'a, which literally meant 'house of manufacture' or 'workshop of industry'. Medieval Venetian traders adopted the term for their great naval shipyard, reshaping it into forms such as arzanà and then arsenale, and the famous Venetian Arsenal became one of the largest manufacturing complexes in medieval Europe. From Italian the word spread into French as arsenal and entered English in the late 1500s, at first meaning a dockyard or store where weapons and military equipment were made and kept. Over time the sense narrowed to the stockpile of weapons itself, and then broadened figuratively to any useful collection of resources or skills. The single 's' and the unstressed '-nal' ending are the spelling traps, since the word looks as though it might double a consonant but does not.

How the word is built

• arsenal (a whole borrowing, not built from English parts; from Arabic dar as-sina'a 'house of manufacture' by way of Italian arsenale)