pado

A pado is made by feet rather than by engineers. The Reta Vortaro defines it as a route on natural ground worn in by people, animals or bicycles passing often, with no surface laid on it. That is the whole of the word, and it is what separates it from its neighbours.

The fence, because three words crowd this space.Vojo is the general road or way, of any size, including the figurative one. Vojeto is vojo plus the diminutive -et-: a small road, a lane, and it says nothing about how it came to be there. Pado says how: somebody walked it into existence. A gravel lane between two cottages is a vojeto; the line of flattened grass across a field that everyone uses and nobody built is a pado. The two overlap constantly in practice and the dictionaries note as much, but the distinction is real when you need it.

The false seam. Pado looks briefly as though it might contain -ad-, the suffix of continued action, leaving a root p-. It does not, and p- is not a root. The word is pad- in one piece, straight from Germanic. The suffix reading would in any case produce a noun of process, which is what -ado does in kantado and legado, and a path is a thing rather than a process.

Figuratively it behaves as in English. La pado de la virto is the path of virtue, and it is narrow in Esperanto too.