intelekto

Another root that dares you to split it. Esperanto has no -ekt- suffix, so intel-ekt-o decomposes into nothing, and intelekt- is one borrowed unit. Nor is the inter- at the front a live prefix here, however much it looks like the one in interparoli: the Latin compound had already fused before Esperanto took it.

The etymology is still worth having, because it links this word to legendo four ranks earlier in the same lesson. Both go back to Latin legere, to gather or to read. A legend is what is read out; the intellect is what reads between. That is a genuine shared ancestor, and it is the sort of thing that makes a vocabulary list stick.

Three near words divide the territory. Menso is the mind as a whole, including mood and memory and everything else that happens inside a head. Racio is reason, the faculty that argues from premises to conclusions, and it is the word that stands against emotion. Intelekto is narrower than menso and broader than racio: it is the power of understanding, of grasping what a thing is. The adjective intelekta means intellectual in the sense "of the intellect", while intelektulo is an intellectual, the person, and carries the same slight edge it does in English.