musko

One root, four near-misses, and they are all worth a second of care. Musko is moss. Muso at rank 1,204 is a mouse. Muŝo at 1,688 is a fly, and it has the hat. Muskolo is a muscle, and it looks like musko with a suffix on it although it is a separate root entirely - there is no -ol- in Esperanto and moss has nothing to do with biceps. Four words, one syllable of difference each, and the only defence is to pronounce all of the letters: MUS-ko has a k in it that muso does not, and muŝo has a hat that neither of the others has.

What it actually is, botanically and in prose. Moss in the strict sense - the bryophytes, the low green stuff on stones and bark and damp roofs. Lichen is likeno and is a different organism, though few writers outside a field guide keep them apart. Muskeca means mossy in the sense of resembling moss, and muskokovrita (moss-covered) is the compound that does most of the work in descriptive writing. It is a mass noun: la musko estas mola, never la muskoj unless you mean species.

Where it earns its rank. In the forest, the ruin and the graveyard - which is to say, in the scenery of the romantic novels that this corpus is largely built from. Moss is what nineteenth-century prose puts on anything it wants you to understand as old and quiet. It sits with arbaro, ŝtono, herbo at rank 958 and ruino, and it is almost always verda.

A small pleasure for anyone with French. Mousse in French is this word, and also foam on beer, and also the chocolate pudding - all three from the same Latin muscus by way of a resemblance somebody once noticed between moss and froth. Esperanto keeps them separate: musko is the plant, ŝaŭmo is the foam.