orbito

The gift is the picture inside it. Latin orbita is not an abstract term at all: it is the rut a cart wheel presses into a dirt road. Roman roads are still grooved with them. When astronomers wanted a word for the path a body keeps returning along, they took the wheel rut, and the metaphor is exact - a planet is running in a groove it has worn. Once you know that, orbito stops being a piece of technical vocabulary and becomes a picture. The same orbis, a ring or a wheel, is behind English orb and orbital.

A false seam that would be very funny if you fell for it. Esperanto has the root oro at rank 374, gold, and modern usage has bito for a bit of computer data. So orbito presents itself, quite cheerfully, as a gold-bit. It is nothing of the sort: orbit- is one indivisible borrowed root, and the or- at the front is Latin orbis, which has no connection to gold whatsoever. The scientific vocabulary article is the place this class of trap gets its proper treatment: the international layer of Esperanto arrives whole, and the more transparent the rest of the language is, the more confidently you will mis-cut it.

The family, and the second meaning. Orbita is the adjective, orbiti is to orbit, and enorbitigi is to put something into orbit, which is en plus orbito plus the causative -ig- and is a properly satisfying build. Anatomy uses the same word for the eye socket - la orbito de la okulo - for the same reason English does, since both are named after the ring shape. The neighbours here are all in the course already: planedo at 1,036, luno at 897, kosmo at 1,382 and stelo at 774.