An arsenal is a place where arms and ammunition are made, maintained and repaired, stored, issued to authorized users, or any combination of those. Over the centuries, this has included every variant of such a place, whether privately or publicly owned (with the latter in older royal and modern state-owned versions).
Armories and arsenals are both places where arms or ammunition may be made, maintained and repaired, stored, or issued. The usage differences between the names is mainly a matter of historical linguistic development. It is a common principle in natural language that synonyms have subtle connotative boundaries (albeit ones that may be somewhat permeable over time and distance).
Read more about Arsenal: Etymology, Types, Operational Subdivision
Famous quotes containing the word arsenal:
“Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality, but to those of another.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“We have the men—the skill—the wealth—and above all, the will.... We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons.... If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear’s work, that is its affair.... We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.”
—Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945)