maizo

The second Caribbean word in twenty. Uragano at 2,688 and maizo at 2,689 are neighbours on the frequency list and neighbours in history: both are Taino words that entered Spanish in the 1490s because Europe had met a thing it had no name for. Say the pair together once and you will remember both.

Say maize, not corn, when you translate it. English corn means whatever grain a region grows most of, so in Britain it has often meant wheat and in the United States it means this plant. Esperanto is unambiguous: maizo is only ever this crop, and greno at 2,164 is the general word for cereal. If you want the cob it is maizspiko, and popcorn is krevmaizo, which is delightful.

The American crops arrived together. Terpomo at 1,400 is a potato and reads as earth-apple, straight from the German Erdapfel; tomato at 2,189 is Nahuatl tomatl by way of Spanish. Three of the plants that fed modern Europe are loanwords from the other side of the Atlantic, and Esperanto, being a European language in its bones, borrowed all three the same way its neighbours did.