krano

The bird is the point. A crane stands on one leg with a long neck bent over, which is what a dockside lifting machine looks like, and what a tap looks like too. Dutch and German kept all three meanings on one word; English split them and never used crane for a tap; Esperanto borrowed only the plumbing sense. So krano is a small piece of etymological luck: a bird's neck, in your kitchen. The bird itself in Esperanto is gruo, and the lifting machine is levmaŝino or gruo again.

Say it carefully, because two near neighbours are waiting.Krono at 1,413 is a crown and krajono at 1,442 is a pencil. Krano, krono, krajono: one vowel decides whether you are turning off the water, crowning a king or sharpening something. All three are common enough that the confusion happens, and the vowel is the whole of the difference in the first pair.

Domestic vocabulary, and useful early. Akvokrano spells out that it is the water one, gaskrano is the gas cock, krankapo is the head of the tap, and kranakvo is tap water as opposed to bottled. The verb you want is malfermi or fermi la kranon - Esperanto opens and closes a tap rather than turning it on and off - and the thing that comes out is measured in gutoj when the washer has gone.