Kilo Lingo

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#2172 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

diet (a prescribed regimen of eating)

Word origin

From Greek diaita, a way of life or a manner of living, by way of Latin diaeta. The narrowing to food alone happened in medicine, where prescribing a way of life meant, in practice, prescribing what to eat.

Origin
Greek, via Latin
Root
diaita
English cognates
diet, dietary

Examples

.

The doctor put him on a new diet.

.

She has been following a diet for two months now.

.

Vegetables are an important part of any diet.

The -- in is not the diminutive suffix, and this is one of the funnier false seams in the language. -- makes things small - a house, a cottage - so a learner peeling it off here is left with di-, and the only root of that shape in Esperanto is , a god. A is not a small god. The root is diet-, borrowed whole from the international word, and the -o on the end is the ordinary noun ending.

Take the meaning narrowly too. In Esperanto a is a regimen: a restricted, deliberate way of eating, usually one somebody has prescribed or chosen. It is what a patient is put on and what a person goes on. It is not the general "what a population eats" sense that English also loads onto the word - for that, Esperanto says o or manĝokutimoj, feeding habits. So "the Mediterranean diet" as a pattern of eating is manĝokutimoj, while "the doctor put me on a diet" is exactly.

The derivations behave: a is dietary, o a dietitian, and i is to be on a diet - one of those places where Esperanto turns a noun into a verb and saves you three English words.

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Esperanto · Free printables

dieto: worksheet, infographic and listicle

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This word is part of lesson 44.