abio

One of the two conifers you need. Esperanto keeps the distinction English keeps and many languages blur. Abio is the fir. Pino, which arrives shortly after it on this frequency list at rank 2792, is the pine. Learn them as a pair, because the difference is real: fir needles come singly off the twig and point in all directions, pine needles come in little bundles of two, three or five. Both are evergreen, both grow in cold places, and both are why a pinglarbaro - a needle-forest - is dark all year.

The Christmas tree question. The tree in the corner of the room in December is a kristnaska abio or, more plainly, a kristnaskarbo. Fir is the usual species, which is why the fuller name usually says abio rather than pino, and why the word turns up in Esperanto texts far more often than a middling forestry term has any right to.

The tree family. Arbo is the tree, arbaro the forest, and the -ar- suffix in the middle of that second word is worth pausing on: a collection of trees, formed by rule, not by a separate root. Abiaro would be a stand of firs specifically. Branĉo is the branch, ligno the timber, and fir timber is soft, pale and cheap, which is what most European floorboards are made of.

Not to be confused. Abio sits three letters away from nothing much, which is a relief after the rest of this chapter. It does not contain the prefix ab-, because Esperanto has no such prefix; it is a plain root with a plain ending, and the only trap is remembering that the stress falls on the i: a-BI-o.