femuro

The anatomical register. Femuro is a technical word doing an everyday job, which is a common situation in this part of the vocabulary. English keeps two words - "thigh" for the limb and "femur" for the bone inside it - and reaches for the second only in a hospital. Esperanto uses femuro for both and lets the sentence sort it out: la femuro doloras is the flesh, la femuro rompiĝis is the bone. If you must be exact, femurosto is the bone specifically. Femura is the adjective, and femurarterio is the femoral artery, which is the sort of compound the medical literature builds all day.

Where it fits in the leg. The course now has the whole limb. Gambo at 2,079 is the leg as a whole, hip to toe - the thing you stand on. Kruro at 837 is properly the shank, the part between knee and ankle, though in practice most speakers use it loosely for the leg too. Genuo at 792 is the knee. Femuro is the part above the knee, and kokso is the hip joint at the top of it. Read from the ground up: piedo, maleolo, kruro, genuo, femuro, kokso. The whole body, joint by joint and organ by organ, is laid out in la korpo, the reference article this chapter ships alongside these words.

One idiom, and it is not obvious. Sur la femuroj is how Esperanto says "on one's lap", because the language has no separate word for a lap - the lap is a shape a sitting body makes, not a body part, and most languages have to improvise. Sidi sur la genuoj de iu is to sit on someone's knee. And femuro is worth having for cooking too: the thigh of a chicken is kokina femuro, which is what a menu in Esperanto will call it.