Translation
to lick
Word origin
From German lecken, which shares an ancient Indo-European root with English lick, Latin lingere and Greek leikhein. It is one of those verbs that sounds like what it describes in half the languages of Europe.
- Origin
- Germanic
- Root
- lecken
- English cognates
- lick
Examples
.
The dog licked my hand.
.
The cat licked the milk out of the plate.
.
The child licked the ice cream and laughed.
A short, concrete, well-behaved verb: transitive, regular like everything else, and needing no notes about which preposition follows it, because it takes a plain object. You lick the thing: .
Keep it apart from gustumi, which is what a cook does to a sauce - to taste something deliberately, to sample it and form a judgement. is the tongue's action and says nothing about whether you were paying attention. The organ itself is the lango, and the two words share no root, so there is no shortcut there.
The affixes work exactly as you would predict, which makes this a comfortable verb to practise them on. Deleki is to lick something off; elleki is to lick a bowl out; prileki is to lick all over; o is licking as an activity. And in the figurative direction Esperanto agrees with English about flattery - o is recognisably a person who licks - but the plain, unmetaphorical is the word a careful writer reaches for.
Where this fits
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leki: worksheet, infographic and listicle
Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "leki" (to lick): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.
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Start your free weekThis word is part of lesson 43.