roso

A chain of near-misses, and it is worth learning as a chain. Three words on this site sit one letter apart and mean nothing like each other:

• roso - dew, this page, rank 2,337
• rosti - to roast or to grill, rank 2,199
• rozo - a rose, rank 1,123

Roso and rosti share four letters and arrived within a hundred ranks of each other, which makes them the dangerous pair: la rosa mateno is a dewy morning and la rostita viando is roast meat, and a dropped t turns one into the other in a way no reader will query. Rozo is the easier one to keep separate in writing and the harder one in speech, because Esperanto z is voiced (as in English zoo) while s never is - ROZ-o against ROS-o. If you say them identically, half your listeners will hear flowers.

Nothing connects them etymologically. Roso is Latin ros, rozo is Latin rosa by way of Greek, and rosti is Germanic, from the family behind English roast. Three separate journeys that happened to land in adjacent seats.

Using it. Rosa is dewy, rosero a single dewdrop (-er- for one small particle of a mass), roseti and rosumi turn up for the falling of dew. Dew is a favourite of Esperanto poetry for the obvious reason that it is two syllables, stresses cleanly and rhymes with a great deal.