ĝirafo

Rank 2,800, and a good place to stop. This is the last word of the band, and it is a nice accident that the milestone landed on a giraffe: a word nobody needs and everybody enjoys. Two thousand eight hundred roots is a working vocabulary by any measure, and in an agglutinative language it is far more than that once the affixes are doing their work. If you have followed the course this far, ĝirafo is the reward.

The zoo set is now complete. Leono at 613, tigro at 1,860, kamelo at 2,212 and now the giraffe, all inside bestoĝardeno at 2,624 - literally an animal-garden, which is what the German Tiergarten and the Dutch dierentuin say too. English is the odd one out with its clipped zoological garden.

And the story got there first, almost. La bestoĝardeno in the last chapter walks a grandmother and a child past the lion, the monkeys, the birds and the tortoise, and never once mentions a giraffe. That is not an oversight: the story was written to a strict ceiling of rank 2,700, and ĝirafo sits a hundred ranks above it. The animal was outside the vocabulary the reader had. It is inside it now.

Say the ĝ. Ĝirafo starts with the sound in English judge, not the g of give: JEE-rah-fo. It is one of the words where the hat is doing exactly the job Zamenhof designed it for, since girafo without the circumflex would be a different word and no word at all. The neck, by the way, is kolo at 830, and it has the same seven vertebrae yours does.