kekso

This completes a trio, and one of its three fences turns out not to be there. Biskvito at 1,980 and kuketo at 2,024 each spent part of their pages sorting out the English mess where biscuit, cookie and small cake overlap. Kekso is the third word, and honesty requires saying what the dictionaries actually do with it.

• kuketo - a genuine build: kuko, a cake, plus the diminutive -et-. A little cake. A bun, a cupcake, the soft iced thing. This fence is real and holds.
• biskvito - from French biscuit, bis coctus, twice cooked. Defined as a small dry crisp bake.
• kekso - from German Keks. Defined as a small dry crisp bake.

Those last two definitions are the same definition. There is no dictionary line between biskvito and kekso, and anyone who tells you there is a firm one is tidying. What there is, is a national tilt: biskvito is the French-shaped word and carries the ship's-biscuit and sponge-biscuit senses with it, while kekso is the German-shaped word and points at the packet on the supermarket shelf. If you want the crisp thing you dunk in tea, either is correct; kekso is the one a German or Scandinavian Esperantist reaches for first, biskvito the one a French or Spanish speaker does.

The etymology is the best joke in the band. English cakes went into German as a single noun Keks, plural Kekse. So an English plural marker was absorbed into a German singular, which Esperanto then borrowed and gave its own plural to. Keksoj is therefore, if you unpack it far enough, "cakes-es". Do not try to decode keks- into anything; it is one root and it is a small monument to how badly borrowing goes.