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Arsenal is derived from an Arabic word dār-(aṣ-)ṣinā'a, meaning "workshop" or "factory." When the original Arabic word was borrowed into Venetian Italian, the initial d was lost, possibly because it was misinterpreted as the Italian preposition di "of." The word came to mean "dock possessing naval stores," and in Venice, the leading naval power in the Mediterranean in the 15th century, the dockyard is known to this day as the Arzenale. The Romance languages retain this meaning in words from the same ancestor that still show the Arabic d, in Italian darsena "dock," for example; in English too, "dockyard" was the original sense, giving way from the late 16th century to "military storehouse."
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