gimnazio

The trap first, because it is the reason this page exists. A gimnazio is not a gym. It is a secondary school on the central European model, the academically selective kind that prepares pupils for university. The room with the wall bars in it is a gimnastikejo, built the ordinary way from gimnastiko plus the place suffix -ej-, and the sporto happens there. The false friends article names this pair without a page to point at; now it has one.

The fence with mezlernejo. Mezlernejo at rank 2,419 is the neutral word for secondary education, the whole span from about eleven to eighteen. Gimnazio is a kind of mezlernejo: the selective, academic one, the German Gymnasium, the Polish gimnazjum, the Czech gymnázium. British English has a word that fits almost exactly, which is why this page is glossed grammar school rather than the vaguer secondary school that mezlernejo already owns.

Why the borrowing looks odd. The Greek gymnasion was a training ground, and the training was physical. It picked up the academic sense because Greek gymnasia had lecture halls attached, and German humanists in the sixteenth century revived the word for their classical schools. English kept the sweaty half and central Europe kept the scholarly half. Esperanto, drawing on continental usage, went with the scholarly half and left English on its own.