Refrigeration and air conditioning

The thirty-fourth entry is il potenziale di riscaldamento globale, and the noun in the middle of it does three jobs in Italian that English keeps in three separate words. Il riscaldamento is first of all the heating in a building: accendere il riscaldamento is to put the heating on, and il riscaldamento a pavimento is underfloor heating. It is next what a player does before kick-off, il riscaldamento prima della partita, which English calls the warm-up — a noun made out of a phrasal verb, which is why no single Italian word will ever look like it. And it is, third, what this entry is about, il riscaldamento globale, global warming. English keeps the three apart because it keeps the verbs behind them apart. « To heat » is what a boiler does to a room, « to warm up » is what a body does to itself, and « to warm » is what is happening to the atmosphere. Italian has one verb for all three, riscaldare, so the noun could not have split even if the language had wanted it to.