altaro

An altaro is the table at the focus of a religious rite, and Esperanto uses it in exactly the encyclopedic register any dictionary would: the thing in the church, the thing in the temple, the thing on the hill in the old stories. It carries no denomination with it.

Here is the seam that is not a seam, and it is a good one. Esperanto has alta, high, and it has the collective suffix -ar-, which turns arbo into arbaro, a forest, and vorto into vortaro, a dictionary. Assemble those and altaro should mean a collection of tall things. It does not, and no Esperantist has ever read it that way.

The reason is that altaro is a borrowed root, altar-, imported whole from Latin altare before anybody was doing arithmetic on it. That the Latin may itself descend from altus, high, is a genuine possibility the etymologists still argue about, and it makes the coincidence a near miss rather than a pure accident. But the Esperanto word cannot be decomposed: alt plus -ar- plus -o would be altaĵaro or something equally clumsy if you actually wanted a group of high things, and nobody would write it. The rule that saves you is the one that always saves you here: a borrowed root is atomic, and the pieces you think you can see inside it are yours, not the language's.