forpermeso

Permission to be elsewhere. Forpermeso is permesi turned into a noun and prefixed with for-, the piece that means away. So it is permission-to-be-away, and that is precisely what leave is: not a holiday you have earned but a licence you have been granted. Soldiers get it, servants got it, employees ask for it. English uses leave and furlough and time off and holiday for what one Esperanto word covers by describing the mechanism.

The for- family is worth collecting, because the prefix is doing real work.For is a word on its own (away, off), and as a prefix it means away from here, permanently or completely: foriri to go away, forpreni to take away, fordoni to give away, forĵeti to throw out, forgesi to forget - which is, literally, to get-away. Each of them is the base verb plus a direction, and none has to be learned as a separate item. Word building covers the whole prefix set.

Register: this is an institution's word. You take forpermeso from an army, a company, a school, a ship - somebody with the authority to say no. That is the difference between it and the neighbouring vocabulary: ripozi is simply to rest, ferio is a holiday in the calendar sense, libertempo is free time as a quantity, and vakanco is a vacation. If nobody had to grant it, it is not forpermeso.

Grammar. It goes with da when you are measuring it - dek tagojn da forpermeso, ten days of leave - and with por when you say what it is for. The verb is forpermesi (to grant leave) and a soldier on leave is forpermesita. Note the shape of the word: four syllables, stress on the penultimate as always, for-per-ME-so.