ebena

The base word has arrived. The ebenaĵo page at rank 2,318 said this plainly: ebena had no page here, because the frequency list ranked the derivative above its own root and the bare adjective was nowhere in the first two and a half thousand. That was true when it was written and it is no longer true. Ebena sits at 2,565, two hundred and forty-seven ranks behind the noun built out of it, and the loop is now closed. A corpus of published prose really does write about plains more often than it writes about levelness, which tells you something about travel writing and nothing about what a learner needs.

What it means, precisely. All the points of the surface sit at roughly the same height, with no hollows and no things sticking up. A billiard table is ebena. A ploughed field is not. Figuratively it extends to a life or a journey with nothing jolting in it, which is the same move English makes with an even temper.

The three-way fence, and it is worth ten minutes.Plata is flat in the sense of having no depth or relief: a coin, a pancake, a sheet of paper. Glata is smooth, about texture, about nothing catching under your hand. Ebena is level, about height. A cobbled street can be ebena without being glata; a large ball bearing is glata and neither plata nor ebena; a coin is plata and, lying on a table, also ebena. English lets flat, smooth and level swap places freely and Esperanto does not.

The family. Ebeno is the abstraction: a plane in the mathematical sense, a level or a layer, as in sur alia ebeno, on another level. Ebenaĵo is the concrete stretch of flat ground, hence a plain, and altebenaĵo a plateau. Ebenigi is to level something, which is what the road builder does to the hillside, and ebeneco is levelness itself.