pasto

What it is. Pasto is any soft kneadable mixture: flour and water on the baker's table, but equally the paste sense, which is why toothpaste is dentopasto and why a thick almond mixture is migdala pasto. Faruno at 2,403 plus akvo gives you pasto, pasto plus baki gives you pano or a kuko, and the whole chain now exists as pages on this site.

The Italian food is not this word. This is the trap the borrowing designed in. Pasta in English means spaghetti and its relations; pasto in Esperanto does not. The dish is pastaĵo, with the -aĵ- suffix meaning a thing made of the stuff, and it is the same suffix that turns bovo into bovaĵo for beef and lingvo into lingvaĵo eight ranks further down this band. Noodles specifically are nudeloj. Ordering paston in an Italian restaurant asks for raw dough.

And it has nothing to do with the past. English past is pasinteco, rank 1,532, from pasi, to pass. Pasto and pasi share three letters and no ancestor: one is Greek porridge, the other Latin passus. Spanish speakers get a second false friend for free, because their pasto is pasture and grass, which in Esperanto is herbo or paŝtejo.