organismo

Here is the false seam, and it is the cleanest one in the band.Organo is a real Esperanto word at rank 2,048. -Ism- is a real Esperanto suffix, naming a doctrine or a system: komunismo, socialismo, esperantismo three ranks earlier in this very band. So organismo looks like organ- plus -ism-, and a learner reasonably reads it as organ-doctrine.

An organism is not organ-ism. A living body is not a belief about organs, and no amount of squinting at the suffix will make it one. Organism- is a single root, borrowed whole from the international scientific vocabulary, and the -ism- sitting in the middle of it is a piece of Greek and Latin word formation that arrived pre-assembled. The dictionaries list organism/o as its own entry rather than under organ/o, which is the practical proof.

Which is the turismo rule, restated. That page puts it best: a suffix only counts as a suffix when the root it leaves behind is a word, and means what the whole is built from. Tur- means nothing, so turismo is one root. Organ- does mean something, which makes this case the harder one - the test that catches it is the second half, the meaning. Organismo is not about organs the way komunismo is about the common. It just contains them. The organo page makes the same point from the other end when it lists organismo, organizi and organiza as the derivations worth noticing.

What it means. Any living thing considered as a working whole: a bacterium, a tree, a person. By extension an institution can be called an organismo when you want to stress that its parts depend on each other, and that metaphor is old enough to be invisible.

The family. Organisma is the adjective. Mikroorganismo is a micro-organism. Organizi is to organise and organizaĵo an organisation, both from the same Greek organon, an instrument, which is also sitting inside energio by way of ergon, work.