skipo

The minimal pair of the chapter. Skipo and ŝipo differ by one hat. A skipo is a team; a ŝipo is a ship. Esperanto's orthography does not let you shrug that off: sx and s are different letters, and a hatless skipo typed where you meant ŝipo is a different word, not a typo the reader will silently fix.

And English makes it worse before it makes it better. A skipper is not the boss of a skipo. English took it from Dutch schipper, from schip, a ship, so skipper belongs with ŝipo and has nothing to do with skipo at all. The resemblance is a trap in both directions.

Except that the trap has a floor. Follow skipo back far enough and it lands in the same place anyway. French équipe comes from esquiper, to fit out a ship, borrowed from Old Norse skipa, to arrange or crew a vessel, which is built on skip, a ship. So skipo and ŝipo really are distant cousins, by way of a thousand years and a Norse longship. That does not make them interchangeable in Esperanto, where they are two separate roots you must learn separately. It just means the resemblance was never quite an accident.

Two senses in the dictionary. The first is a group working together under one head: a construction gang, a research team, the crew of a boat. The second is one of several such groups taking turns, so la nokta skipo is the night shift. The Reta Vortaro adds a usage note worth passing on: some writers prefer laborantaro, taĉmento or plain opo, and teamo has taken over most of the sporting ground. Skipo is standard, common and slightly contested, which is a normal condition for an international borrowing.