Writing about the regatta in Crossed Wires made me wonder where the word came from.
In 1652 it was the name of a cut-throat boat race held in Venice on the Grand Canal. Their word for compete was regattare and as the gondoliers competed for mastery, you can see why the boat race became known as The Regatta.
To keep order the regatta was preceded by a fleet of bissone, long boats loaded with noblemen armed with bows and arrows. They would keep order by pelting the more unruly spectators with terracotta shot.
In 1775, a boat race on the Thames was named after this Venetian gondola race, and so regatta gradually came to mean a sporting event consisting of a series of boat races.
While browsing, I was interested to see how many of our English words weve borrowed from the Venetian dialect.
In Venice in 1506, arzenale meant dockyard, from the Arabic dar as-singaah workshop. The Venetians applied the word to a large wharf in their city and in English arsenal eventually came to mean a storehouse for weapons.
Gondola, as you would expect, is of Venetian origin and comes from Rhaeto-Romanic dialect meaning rock, roll. Now, as well as the flat-bottomed boat used on Venetian canals, it also means the cabin on a suspended ski lift and a set of display shelves in a supermarket.
Happy puzzling!
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