Harbour and coastal works

La darsena is the enclosed basin inside a port, the water that stays still while the sea outside does not, and the name travelled a long way to get there. Behind it is the Arabic dār aṣ-ṣināʿa, the house of manufacture, which is what a state shipyard was: the place where hulls were built, fitted out and kept. The Italian ports took that phrase in and made two words of it. One is la darsena, which kept the water and let the workshop go. The other is l’arsenale, which in Venice named the whole shipbuilding compound — arzanà in the Venetian of the time — and that is the one English borrowed, as « arsenal ». Only the second branch drifted towards weapons, and English narrowed it again, to a store of arms and from there to a figure of speech: an « arsenal » of arguments. So a reader who already owns the one word owns this list’s word too. Same house of manufacture; one branch kept the guns, the other kept the harbour.