kulo

The false seam here runs backwards, and that is what makes it worth a page. Kulero is a spoon. Kulo is a mosquito. -Er- is a real, busy suffix meaning one small piece of a mass - sablo sand gives sablero a grain, neĝo snow gives neĝero a flake - so the eye reads kul- plus -er- and offers you a fragment of a mosquito. A spoon is not a piece of a mosquito. Kuler- is one indivisible borrowed root, and so is kul-; they simply share three letters.

Usually a mosquito, sometimes a gnat. Kulo translates the Culex family, which is what most Europeans mean by mosquito, and it stretches to the small biting flies English calls gnats and midges. If you need to be precise, moskito exists for the tropical genera. Ordinary conversation does not need the distinction: the thing whining round your ear at two in the morning is a kulo.

The bite is piko. Kulo pikas, it stings or pricks - not mordi, which needs teeth. Kulpiko is the bump it leaves, and kulmordo is the mistake a lot of English speakers make first.