meleagro

The etymology is a Greek myth, and it is worth the detour. Meleager of Calydon killed the great boar Artemis had sent to ravage his father's kingdom, then died young in the way heroes in that cycle always do. His sisters wept over his body until Artemis, out of pity or impatience depending on which teller you believe, turned them into birds - the speckled guinea fowl the Greeks consequently called meleagrides, the Meleagrids. The spots were the sisters' tears. Two thousand years later Linnaeus needed a genus name for the big American bird that European traders had confused with the guinea fowl, reached for Meleagris, and that is how a hero of the Calydonian boar hunt ended up on the Christmas table.

Which explains the mess every European language is in about this bird. English called it turkey because the traders bringing it in came through Turkey. French says dinde, short for poule d'Inde, a hen of the Indies. Portuguese says peru. Turkish, magnificently, says hindi. Every one of them names a country the bird does not come from, because it comes from Mexico. Esperanto sidestepped the whole argument by taking the Linnaean name, which is the same move it makes whenever the national words disagree and none of them is right.

The built forms follow the ordinary rules. Meleagraĵo is the meat - -aĵ- for the concrete product, exactly as bovaĵo is beef and ŝafaĵo is mutton. Meleagrino is the hen, meleagrido the poult, and meleagrejo the place they are kept. You will also hear indiana koko in casual speech, literally an Indian fowl, which repeats the old geographical mistake but is widely understood. Meleagro is the word a dictionary or a menu will use.