doto

Why a word like this is in a modern frequency list at all. Doto is a historical and legal term, not a piece of everyday conversation, and if you meet it you will almost certainly meet it in a story. Esperanto's reading corpus leans heavily on nineteenth-century literature, on the Bible, and on the folk tales Zamenhof and his contemporaries translated wholesale, and every one of those genres is full of marriages arranged with property attached. The word earns its rank in the archive rather than in the street, and that is worth knowing before you use it: saying that your partner brought you a doto will land as a joke or as an insult, never as a description.

What it actually names. A doto is the property a bride, or her family, brought to a marriage. It is not a wedding present, which is a donaco, and it is not an inheritance, which you heredi. The distinguishing feature is the direction and the timing: a dowry travels with the bride at the moment of the marriage, and it belonged to the arrangement rather than to either person. Most legal systems that recognised dowries have retired them; the word survives because the literature does.

The verb widens it, and this is the useful half. Doti is to endow, in the ordinary English sense of giving somebody a capacity rather than a chest of linen: la naturo ne riĉe dotis lin is "nature did not endow him generously". From that comes naturdoto, a natural gift or talent, and naturdotita, gifted. So the root has a live modern branch even though the noun does not, and naturdoto is the form you are most likely to want in your own writing. Esperanto does this often: an archaic noun keeps a perfectly current verb.

The doni connection is real, not folk etymology. Latin dos and Latin dare grow from the same ancient root meaning to give, so doni, donaco, doto and English donate, dowry and endow are all cousins. That is a rare case where the resemblance you notice is the truth rather than a trap, and it is worth banking, because Esperanto's Latin layer more often sets traps than confirms guesses.