Warehousing and order picking

The fourth entry is alvéolo de estante, and the noun is one English owns but keeps locked up in a hospital. Both words rest on Latin alveus, a hollow — a trough, the hold of a ship, the bed a river runs in — and on its diminutive alveolus, a little hollow. Portuguese has let that little hollow stay general. O alvéolo is the cell of a honeycomb, the socket a tooth sits in, the air sac of a lung and, in a warehouse, the compartment of the racking that one article lives in, which is what o artigo pequeno fica num alvéolo de estante says. English took the same word and shut it in anatomy. « Alveolus » is a lung or a tooth and nothing else, and the only place it gets out is phonetics, where the alveolar ridge is named after the tooth sockets along it. For a shelf compartment English has to look elsewhere, and it looks to the birds: the racking has a « bin », and the small compartment in an office is a « pigeonhole », after the nesting holes of a dovecote.