Weaponry

How to spell weaponry

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce weaponry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does weaponry mean?

1. nounWeapons considered collectively, especially the arms available to a military force.

Weaponry in a sentence

• The museum displayed medieval weaponry behind thick glass.

• Modern naval weaponry relies heavily on guided missiles.

Where does weaponry come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word comes from the Old English waepen, meaning an instrument used in fighting or hunting, a native Germanic term with close relatives across the family such as the Dutch wapen and the German Waffe. The collective ending -ry is a worn-down form of -ery, ultimately borrowed from French -erie, which itself goes back to Latin; it gathers many individual items into a single mass, just as it does in 'jewellery', 'machinery', and 'cutlery'. So 'weaponry' literally bundles all the weapons together into one collective sense rather than naming a single arm. The combined form is relatively modern, appearing in English in the nineteenth century once the productive -ry suffix was freely attached to everyday nouns. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the 'ea' of weapon sounds like a short 'e', and the soft schwa before the final -ry tempts writers to drop or reshuffle letters.

How the word is built

• weapon (instrument of combat, from Old English waepen)
• -ry (collective noun suffix denoting a body or class of things)