Hydropower

The fifth entry is il coronamento della diga, and the last noun in it is the one word on this list that is not Latin at all. La diga came into Italian from French digue, and French had taken it from Middle Dutch dijc — the speech of a country that had to think about holding water back before anybody else in Europe did. English holds the same Germanic word, and holds it twice over, because Old English dīc named both halves of one act of digging: the trench cut into the ground and the bank thrown up beside it. Two pronunciations of that single word hardened into two nouns, « a dike » for the wall and « a ditch » for the hollow, which is why the pair are opposites and relatives at once. Italian took only the wall, and took it late and as a loan, which is why la diga has no verb behind it. There is no digare, where English can still say that a field was ditched.