frida

The everyday word for cold is malvarma, and this is not it. Frida is marked a neologism in the Reta Vortaro. It is a real word with a real entry, used in refrigeration and other technical writing and occasionally reached for in verse when a poet wants a heavier syllable than malvarma gives - but if you say frida about the weather to an ordinary speaker you will sound like a thermodynamics textbook. Say malvarma. That is the fence, and this page exists to build it.

So why is it on a frequency list at all? Because of one derivative.Fridujo, a fridge, sits at rank 1999 on this course - a thousand-odd places ahead of the root it is built from. Its page explains the build: frid- plus -uj-, the container suffix, gives "the cold-container". Nobody hesitates over fridujo; the word is completely naturalised, and it drags frida along behind it into the corpus.

That inversion is a genuine feature of Esperanto vocabulary, not an accident. The affix system is productive enough that a derived word can become common while its root stays marginal, because the derived word names something people talk about and the root names something they have another word for. You will meet the same pattern at malmultekosta and elsewhere in this chapter's neighbourhood. When a rare root has a common child, learn the child and keep the root for reading.

The rest of the family. Frido is coldness, fridi is to be cold, fridigi is to chill something, and fridigilo is a cooling device. Neighbours worth knowing: glacio ice, frosto frost, temperaturo temperature.