deserto

One letter separates pudding from the Sahara, and this is the pudding.Deserto, with an s, is dessert: the sweet course at the end of a meal. Dezerto, with a z and at rank 916, is a desert: sand, rock, no water. They are unrelated words that happen to have landed next to each other in Esperanto's phonetic space, and they have been quietly ruining menus for a century.

In Esperanto the two are not even close to homophones, which is the good news. S is always the hiss in English sit, and z is always the buzz in zoo. Say de-SER-to and you get sweets; say de-ZER-to and you get sand. Every letter in Esperanto has exactly one sound, so unlike English there is no way to hedge: the spelling and the pronunciation move together, and if you can hear the difference you can spell it.

There is a third word in the same neighbourhood, and it is a verb.Dezerti means to desert from an army, to go absent without leave. So the trio runs: deserto you eat, dezerto you cross, dezerti is what the soldier does. The adjective dezerta covers both desolate and deserted, which is the only place the two English senses genuinely overlap.

Useful vocabulary either side of it. Dolĉaĵo is a sweet thing in general, kuko is cake, glaciaĵo is ice cream, and kiel deserto is the phrase for "for dessert". The rest of the traps of this kind are collected in false friends in Esperanto.