kabo

Two letters short of three other words. Kabo is a headland. Kablo is a cable, kabano is a hut and kabineto is a small private room, and the four of them share nothing but an opening. None is derived from any other, and there is no kab- root sitting underneath them: they arrived separately from French, English and Latin and simply collided at the front. This happens constantly in the borrowed layer of the vocabulary, and the defence is to learn the whole word rather than the first syllable.

It is a shape, not a size. A kabo is any point of land that runs out into water, from a spur you can walk to the end of in ten minutes to the Cape of Good Hope, which Esperanto calls Kabo de Bona Espero. That naming pattern is worth having: geographical kabo goes in front and stays capitalised, exactly as in English, so Kabo Horn and Kabo Verdo.

Do not confuse it with the clothing. The garment called a cape comes from a different Latin word, cappa, and in Esperanto it is mantelo or kapuĉo depending on whether it hangs from the shoulders or covers the head. English merged the headland and the cloak into one spelling centuries ago; Esperanto kept the accident out.