More words.

Tuesday's post and Sky Sports' early match last Sunday reminded me that medieval Venice gave us another of our words.  Venice's power came - like that of our own early empire - from their domination of the sea, and so their dockyard was of major importance to them.  It can be said that they predated Henry Ford by the best part of a thousand years in inventing assembly line technique - they had specialist teams constructing individual parts of a ship, which could then be quickly assembled together.  At the height of their production, it was said that they could produce a ship every day. Anyway they called the area where all this work was carried out by a word derived from two Arabic words meaning "place of manufacture".  And that word was Arsenale which of course gives us our word arsenal, and the Arsenal were playing last Sunday.