nobelo

Esperanto splits a job English does with one word. Nobla is noble in character - generous, high-minded, the sort of thing you say about an act. Nobelo is noble by birth - a count, a baron, somebody with a coat of arms. The second example sentence above is the standard classroom line for the pair, and it works because the two words really are unrelated in use even though they share a Latin ancestor.

Now the collision that catches people. Nobelo looks exactly like the Nobel Prize, and it has nothing to do with it. Alfred Nobel was a Swedish surname, and Esperanto writes proper nouns as proper nouns: the prize is Nobel-premio, capital N, hyphen, the name left alone. A sentence about la nobelo is about a man with a title; a sentence about la Nobel-premio is about Stockholm in December. The near-miss is worth a moment because both words turn up in exactly the same register of writing, which is history and journalism.

The family is regular: nobelino a noblewoman, nobelaro the nobility as a class, nobeligi to ennoble somebody, nobela as the adjective.