proletaro

Check the build before you translate it, because the answer is not obvious.Proletaro looks like an international borrowing of proletariat, and the resemblance is very close. It is not one. The Esperanto root is prolet-, the noun proleto is a single proletarian, and proletaro is that noun plus the collective suffix -ar-. The dictionary definition is exactly three words long: la tuta klaso de proletoj, the whole class of proletarians. The word is built, not borrowed, and the fact that it lands within one letter of the French prolétariat is a coincidence the language got away with.

The base word has no page here, and that is worth saying. Proleto is absent from the first three thousand ranks of our frequency list while the collective sits at 2,579. The corpus writes about the class and not about the individual, which is a fair reflection of how the word is actually used in political prose: nobody says a proletarian did this. The suffix is doing all the work and the base is nearly theoretical.

The -ar- reading, checked against the band. Compare vazaro four ranks earlier, which is vazo plus -ar- and means the crockery. Same machine, same result: all the members of a kind, taken as one thing. Proletariaro also exists as a longer variant, and proletario as a longer word for the individual, both tolerated and both less used.

Register. This is a historical and political word and it carries its nineteenth century with it. It belongs beside kapitalismo at 2,391, socialismo, komunismo, sindikato for a trade union, laborista movado for the labour movement and burĝaro, the bourgeoisie, which is the same suffix again on the other side of the argument. Esperanto has an unusually deep vocabulary here for the plain reason that a large part of its early movement was made of exactly these people.