kiraso

Register first, because this is a museum word. Kiraso is body armour: the plate a kavaliro wore, the thing standing empty in a glass case with a card beside it. It is not modern protective clothing and it is not a metaphor unless you want it to be one. Where English says a suit of armour and needs three words, Esperanto says kiraso and is done.

The leather is still inside the word. French cuirasse is built on cuir, leather, from Latin corium, a hide - because the earliest cuirasses were cuir bouilli, leather boiled hard. By the time anybody was making them out of steel the name had set. English cuirass carries the same fossil, and so, more surprisingly, does excoriate: to strip the hide off something.

The family, and the ship. Kirasa is armoured, kirasi is to armour something, and senkirasa is unarmoured. The one worth flagging is kirasŝipo, the nineteenth-century ironclad - and it is also a small orthographic curiosity, because kiras- ends in s and ŝipo begins with ŝ, so the compound puts the two sibilants nose to nose. Esperanto permits it and the optional hyphen (kiras-ŝipo) is there for anybody who finds it uncomfortable. Beside it, ŝildo is the shield carried on the arm: armour you hold rather than armour you wear.