motoro in Esperanto: engine, motor (noun)

Translation

engine, motor

Word origin

From Latin motor, 'a mover', the agent noun of movere, 'to move'. Esperanto took the international word whole rather than building it.

Origin: Latin
Root: motor
English cognates: motor, motion, mobile, remove

Examples

.

The engine of the old car makes a lot of noise.

.

That machine has a powerful motor and two wheels.

.

Without an engine the ship cannot go fast.

A false seam, and an honest complication. looks like a root plus an agent ending -or, on the model of English actor and inventor. Esperanto has no suffix -or-. Its agent suffixes are -- for a settled trade (kuiristo, instruisto) and -ant- for whoever is doing it at the moment. is one borrowed root, motor-, plus the ordinary noun ending -o.

The complication is that the agent ending is really in there - in Latin. Motor is e with the Latin agent suffix -tor on it, so genuinely does mean "the mover", and it genuinely is a relative of movi. What you cannot do is get from to by any Esperanto rule; the Esperanto word for a mover, built properly, would be movanto or moviganto, and it means something else. The seam is real history and false grammar, which is the harder kind to spot.

In use, covers any engine - petrol, electric, steam. is a motorbike, senmotora describes a glider or a sailing boat, and turns up figuratively for the driving force behind something, exactly as English does with "the engine of growth".

Related words

maŝino

machine

aŭto

car

rado

wheel

elektro

electricity

ŝipo

ship, boat, vessel

Where this fits

The 1,000 most common Esperanto words

Where this word sits in the core vocabulary, and what to learn around it.

Esperanto vocabulary by CEFR level

How many words each level actually needs, with real counts.

Add to review queue

Track this word in your spaced-repetition queue and be tested on it at the right interval.

Go to my review queue