martiro

The gift inside the word. Martys in Greek was a witness. Not a hero, not a victim, not a saint: a person who stands up and says what they saw. That is all the word meant when the first Christian communities started using it, and the sense we now have grew out of a grim practical fact, which is that testifying in the wrong place got you killed. The dying is not in the etymology. It arrived afterwards, and then swallowed the original meaning whole. When you meet martiro in a text, the buried claim is always about testimony first.

How it behaves. Martiro is the person; martireco or martirado is the condition or the ordeal; martirigi is to make a martyr of somebody, which is what the persecutors do rather than what the martyr does. Martira is the adjective. The word takes no gender marking as standard, and a martirino is used only where the sex is worth saying.

Register: encyclopedic and religious, and slightly dangerous. The neutral uses are historical and doctrinal, and Esperanto keeps the ironic English use as well: somebody who faras sin martiro over the washing-up. The word is strong enough that reaching for it lightly reads as sarcasm, so reach for suferi if you only mean somebody had a bad time. A martiro is a person a community has decided to remember, which is a different claim entirely, and the vocabulary around it sits with sankta, eklezio and profeto.