dimensio

A scientific word with a scientific job. Dimensio is one of the directions in which a thing can be measured. A line has one, a page has two, a ĉambro has three, and a physicist will tell you about the fourth over a drink. In the plural it does the everyday job English gives it too: la dimensioj de la tablo are its measurements.

Note what it is not. Dimensio is a direction of measurement, not the number that comes out of measuring. The size of a thing is grandeco, its height alteco, its width larĝeco, its length longeco - the -ec- suffix turning an adjective into the quality it names. So kiaj estas la dimensioj? asks along which axes, and kioma estas la alteco? asks how tall. Confusing the two is the commonest mistake with this word and it comes straight from English, which lets dimensions mean measurements in casual speech.

The figurative sense travelled with it. Morala dimensio, politika dimensio, nova dimensio de la problemo - the metaphor of an extra axis of consideration works in Esperanto exactly as in English, because both borrowed it from the same nineteenth-century scientific prose. It is not a stretch and no Esperantist will blink at it. The scientific Esperanto article covers the register these words live in.

And the science-fiction bonus. Alia dimensio is another dimension in the sense every space opera means, interdimensia vojaĝo is travel between them, and la kvara dimensio is time. Esperanto has a long and genuinely good science-fiction tradition, and this is one of the words it runs on. The word is also a favourite of translators for a reason worth noticing: dimensio sounds international enough to feel technical while being completely transparent to anyone who knows mezuri.