marmoro

One root, however much it looks like two. The eye wants to read mar- plus -moro and find maro, the sea, or moro, a custom, somewhere inside. Neither is there. Marmoro is a single borrowed root, marmor-, and the doubled syllable is Greek reduplication showing through from marmairein, to sparkle - the same shimmer that named the stone in the first place. This is the atmosfero lesson again: a long borrowed root can wear a familiar-looking middle without having a seam in it.

The material words around it. Ŝtono is stone in general, granito granite, argilo clay, and marble is the one you reach for when a thing is meant to last and to be looked at: statuoj, kolonoj, the floor of a palaco. Marmora is the adjective and marmorejo a marble quarry, built with the -ej- you already know.

What it does not mean. The glass marble a child plays with is not marmoro. English named the toy after the stone and then went on making the toys out of glass; Esperanto calls it a globeto or a ludsfero, using the sfero that arrives six ranks below this one. And marbled paper, or a marbled cake, is marmorumita - the -um- suffix doing what it always does, which is to mean something to do with this, work it out from context.