Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of sekigi
Coloured illustration of sekigi
#1891 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

to dry (something), to dry out

Word origin

Built inside Esperanto: seka 'dry' plus the causative suffix -ig-. The root seka comes from Latin siccus, dry, the same word behind the wine label sec and the English desiccate.

Origin
Esperanto, on Latin siccus
Root
seka + -ig-
English cognates
desiccate, sack (the wine)

Examples

.

The sun dried the clothes in an hour.

.

She dried her hands with warm air.

, .

Dry the plates, please.

A textbook --. Take the adjective seka, dry; add --, "to make ...", and you get "to make dry", which is exactly what the transitive English verb means. The sun dries the clothes: the sun is doing it to them.

Its partner is , with --, which turns the same idea round so the subject undergoes it: , the clothes dried. English uses one verb for both jobs and leaves you to work out from context whether the shirt is drying or being dried; Esperanto marks the difference in the word, and getting --/-- the wrong way round is the single most common mistake learners make past the first month. The pair is worked through in the -ig- and -iĝ- article, and the wider question of which verbs take objects at all in transitivity.

Two useful relatives fall out of the same root: o is a dryer (--, the tool suffix) and o a drying room.

Where this fits

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Esperanto · Free printables

sekigi: worksheet, infographic and listicle

Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "sekigi" (to dry (something), to dry out): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.

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This word is part of lesson 38.