literumi

Take it apart. Litero is a letter of the alphabet. Add -um-, the suffix with no meaning, and the verb ending, and you get literumi - to do the letter thing, which turns out to mean spelling a word out one letter at a time. That is the whole derivation, and it is a good one to meet late in the course, because by now you can read the shape before you know the word.

Why -um- and not something honest. Every other Esperanto affix carries a fixed meaning: -ej- is the place, -il- is the tool, -ist- is the person. -Um- is the official exception, defined in the Fundamento as having no meaning at all. It says only that the new word has something to do with the root, and convention settles what. There is no rule that would get you from "letter" to "spell aloud" - you simply have to know, and the honest way to teach it is to say so. The course has now taught the whole family:

• akvumi - to water, from akvo
• amindumi - to court, from aminda
• brakumi - to hug, from brako
• butikumi - to go shopping, from butiko
• cerbumi - to puzzle over, from cerbo
• gustumi - to taste, from gusto
• malvarmumi - to catch a cold, from malvarma
• mastrumi - to keep house, from mastro
• parkumi - to park, from parko
• plenumi - to fulfil, from plena
• seksumi - to have sex, from sekso

Eleven roots, eleven unrelated jumps, one suffix, and literumi is the twelfth. The -um and word formation article explains why a planned language needs an overflow pipe like this and what it costs. Beware the decoys in the same shape: lumo, sumo, kostumo and parfumo end in the same three letters and contain no suffix at all.

When you will actually need it. Spelling out loud is a thing Esperanto speakers do constantly, because the movement is international and half the names in the room are not in anybody's alphabet. Reading the letters is easy - the language is spelled as it sounds - but the hatted letters need naming, and the two conventions are worth knowing before somebody asks you to spell ĉambro down a telephone line. The same problem turns up the moment you tajpi anything, and our article on typing Esperanto covers the x-system and the h-system, the two ways to write ĉ on a keyboard that has no ĉ.

Literumado is spelling as a skill or a subject; literumilo is a spell checker, which is -um- and -il- stacked and is about as far as this word can sensibly be pushed.