elito

A false seam worth naming, because this one traps people. Elito looks like it should decompose. Esperanto has the prefix el- (out of), and it has the participle suffix -it- (passive, completed), so el-it-o would parse beautifully as the out-taken thing - which is, maddeningly, more or less what an elite is. It is still wrong. There is no verb eli, -it- cannot attach to a prefix with nothing between them, and elito is a single indivisible root borrowed whole from French. The morphology is a coincidence produced by the etymology, and the etymology is doing the work.

The real relative is a word you learned at rank 319. French élite is the past participle of élire, from Latin eligere: ex out, plus legere to pick. That same verb, arriving by a different door, gave Esperanto elekti, to choose. So elito and elekti are cousins, and the elite are, quite literally, the chosen. English keeps the whole family - elect, election, eligible, select, elite - and pretends they are unrelated.

How it behaves. It is a collective singular, like English: la elito takes a singular verb and means the group as a body. It attracts adjectives more than most nouns do, and most of them are political: la politika elito, la financa elito, la kultura elito. Elita as an adjective means top-flight rather than snobbish, and elitismo covers the ideology. The nobelo at rank 1,905 is an elite by birth, the rango at 1,943 is your place in a ladder, the klaso is the broad social band, and the privilegio at 2,249 is what an elite actually holds.

Voice. The word is faintly hostile in Esperanto as in English. Nobody calls themselves the elite. A movement founded on the idea that a language should belong to everybody has always used the word carefully, and the Esperanto press of the early twentieth century used it mostly to describe the people it was arguing with.