- armory
- armory, arsenal, magazine have related but usually distinguishable technical military senses.Armory once carried the meanings now associated with arsenal and magazine, but in current use it has commonly two applications: one, a public building in which troops (as of the National Guard) have their headquarters and facilities (as for drill and storage); the other, an establishment under government control for the manufacture of arms (as rifles, pistols, bayonets, and swords).Arsenal in its narrow sense is applied to a government establishment for the manufacture, storage, and issue of arms, ammunition, and related equipment: in popular and especially in figurative use the word usually suggests a store of or a storehouse for weapons and ammunition{
weapons from the arsenal of poetic satire— Reed
}{make America the arsenal of the democracies
}Magazine is strictly applied to a storehouse for all sorts of military and naval supplies including especially arms and ammunition. In extended use it often more narrowly suggests a storehouse for explosives{a powder magazine
}{as when high Jove his sharp artillery forms, and opes his cloudy magazine of storms— Pope
}{an educated man stands, as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filled with all the weapons and engines which man’s skill has been able to devise from the earliest time— Carlyle
}In extended use magazine is applied to a supply chamber (as in a gun for cartridges, in a camera for films, or in a typesetting machine for matrices).
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.