graveda

The plain, unembarrassed word. Esperanto has no coy alternatives to pick between, no expecting, no in the family way. Graveda virino is a pregnant woman, gravedeco is pregnancy, gravediĝi is to become pregnant, and graveda testo is a pregnancy test. Clinical when you need it to be, ordinary when you do not.

Now the seam, because it is the useful thing on this page. Graveda is not grava, important, with something added. There is no -ed- suffix in Esperanto, so there is nothing to add; graveda is a single root that happens to start with the same four letters. A learner who reads it as grav- plus an ending will make a word that does not exist and miss one that does.

What makes the trap worth the trouble is that etymologically the two are cousins. Latin gravis meant heavy, and heaviness went two ways: it became weight of consequence, which gave grava, and it became the weight a pregnant body carries, which gave gravidus and so graveda. Same Latin ancestor, two separate Esperanto roots, and no grammatical route from one to the other. That is exactly the distinction the language asks you to hold: what a word came from, and what it is built from, are different questions.