Translation
cigar
Word origin
From Spanish cigarro, which came into Europe from the Caribbean with the thing itself. Where the Spanish word came from is genuinely unsettled and the two usual accounts are both plausible.
- Origin
- Spanish
- Root
- cigarro
- English cognates
- cigar, cigarette
Other proposed origins
- Most often traced to Mayan sicar, to smoke rolled tobacco leaves, which the Spanish would have picked up in Yucatán along with the habit. (Mayan, sicar)
- Others derive it from Spanish cigarra, a cicada, on the strength of the shape: a fat brown body tapering at one end. (Spanish, cigarra)
Examples
.
He smoked a cigar in the garden.
.
A cigar is bigger than a cigarette.
.
There were ten cigars in the box.
The tobacco set is now complete. Fumi at rank 1,020 is to smoke, cigaredo at 1,587 arrived back in chapter 16, tabako landed at 2,322, pipo at 2,394, and the cigar closes it here. Four objects, one verb, and between them they cover most of what a nineteenth-century Esperanto text has anybody doing in a drawing room.
Watch the pair, because the suffix is a mirage. and look like a root and a derived form, and they are not. Esperanto's own diminutive is --, so a small cigar built the Esperanto way would be a o. has -ed-, which is not an Esperanto suffix at all: the word came over whole from French cigarette, keeping the French diminutive fossilised inside it. Two borrowed roots that happen to be relatives, sitting next to each other looking like a paradigm.
Where the word came from, honestly. Spanish cigarro brought the object and the name to Europe together, and after that the trail forks. One account takes it from Mayan sicar, to smoke rolled leaves. The other takes it from cigarra, the cicada, for the shape. Dictionaries disagree and this page is not going to pretend otherwise; both are above.
Useful bits. o is a cigar holder, using -- for a thing you stick something else into, the same suffix that gives o a candlestick. Cigarfumanto is a cigar smoker, and i is what you do to a fish.
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cigaro: worksheet, infographic and listicle
Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "cigaro" (cigar): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.
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Start your free weekThis word is part of lesson 57.