paketo

This one really is what it looks like, which is worth saying in a band full of false seams. Paket- decomposes honestly: pak- plus -et-, the diminutive. A pako is a pack or a bundle; a paketo is a small one. The dictionaries list it under the root pak- for exactly that reason, next to pakaĵo, pakumo and pakaĵujo, and no borrowed root has to be invented to explain it. Compare kombini at rank 2,489, which looks equally decomposable and is not: the difference is that here both pieces mean what the whole is made of.

The three nouns on this root, and how to keep them apart.

• Pako is a pack or bundle in general. It has no page of its own; it lives on the paki page, where the verb is.
• Pakaĵo at rank 1,586 is the packed thing, and it is also your luggage. -Aĵ- makes a concrete object out of an idea.
• Paketo is a small pako: a packet of cigarettes, a parcel through the post, a packet of seeds. Size is the whole of the difference, and it is a real one - you do not carry a paketo of suitcases.

In use. Paketi is to make something up into a packet, and enpaketigi to put something into one. A poŝta paketo is a postal parcel and paketservo a parcel service. In computing a network packet is a paketo too, and datumpaketo if you want to be explicit.

A note on -et- while you are here. It shrinks physically and it also softens: dometo a cottage, varmeta lukewarm, rideti to smile as against ridi to laugh. In paketo it is doing the plain physical job, and that is the easy end of the suffix.