Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of balailo
Coloured illustration of balailo
#2367 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

broom

Word origin

Built inside Esperanto from balai, to sweep, plus -il-, the tool suffix. Balai is French balayer, from Old French balai, a besom, which is generally traced to a Gaulish or Breton word for the broom plant. English borrowed the same French verb much later for balayage, the hairdressing technique.

Origin
Esperanto derivation on a French root
Root
balai + -il-
English cognates
balayage

Examples

.

The broom stands behind the door.

.

She took the broom out of the cupboard.

.

The new broom is better than the old one.

Decode it. Balai, which arrives at rank 2,876 in the last chapter, is the verb to sweep. -- is the tool suffix, one of the most reliable in the language: the tool for doing X is X-. So is the sweeping-tool, the broom. You have met the pattern already in o (a comb, from , to comb), o (a knife, from , to cut), (a key, from , to lock) and (cutlery, the collection of eating-tools). Once -- is in your hands, a large slice of the household vocabulary stops being vocabulary.

Watch the double vowel. The root ends in -ai and the suffix begins with -, so the word is -a-i-l-o, four syllables, with the a and the i pronounced separately: ba--i-lo. It is not a diphthong, and it is not ŭ. Learners who have just internalised as one sound routinely compress this one by mistake.

The rest of the cleaning cupboard. is to sweep the floor; o is the sweepings, the dust and rubbish you gather up; o is a road sweeper; and forbalai is to sweep away, used as freely in the figurative sense as English does with a government or an objection.

And the flying kind. Esperanto keeps the same word for the witch's broomstick, so o needs no special term. Balailtenilo exists if you really need the handle by itself, though is what anyone would actually say.

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Esperanto · Free printables

balailo: worksheet, infographic and listicle

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This word is part of lesson 48.