sabro

One root, no seams. Sabro looks briefly as though it might be hiding something - sab- plus -ro? - and it is not. There is no -ro suffix in Esperanto, sabro is a single indivisible root, and the only thing you can do with it is add endings and affixes to the outside: sabra, sabri (to strike with a sabre), sabrado (sabre fighting), sabrofrapo (a sabre blow). Take the word whole.

It is not the general word for a sword. Glavo, at rank 705, is the sword in the abstract: the straight two-edged blade of Rome and of heraldry, the sword in the proverb and in the phrase about pen and sword. A sabro is specific - curved, single-edged, worn at the hip by cavalry, drawn on horseback. If you are writing about a knight, a duel or scripture, the word is glavo. If there is a horse in the picture, it is sabro.

Where the corpus meets it. This is a nineteenth-century military word and it arrives in Esperanto with the translated novels: the oficiro, the parade, the kavaliro at rank 1,806, the sword hung over the kameno once the fighting stopped. It survives today in two live contexts, fencing (sabro is one of the three weapons, beside floreto and spado) and the bottle-opening trick, sabri ĉampanon.

Pronunciation. Two syllables, SAB-ro, stress on the first as always. The s is the plain hiss - this is not one of the hatted letters, and writing ŝabro would give you something that is not a word. Compare ŝarko five ranks later, where the hat is doing real work.