Nuclear technology

The sixteenth entry is il recipiente in pressione del reattore, and the noun in the middle of it is the one an English reader is likeliest to misread. Un recipiente in Italian is a container, a vessel, anything built to hold something else — the jar on a shelf, the tank under a boiler, the steel cylinder this entry names. Our « recipient » comes from the very same Latin present participle, recipiens, from recipere, to take in; but the two languages handed the word to opposite sides of that act. English gave it to the person at the receiving end, so that a recipient is whoever gets the letter, the transplant or the prize, and the sense of a container survives only in old books of chemistry. Italian gave it to the object and named the person elsewhere, with il destinatario for post and il beneficiario for money. So il recipiente in pressione is a pressure vessel and nothing more, and a sentence about un recipiente chiuso describes a closed container, not a discreet addressee.