standardo

The word from the anthem. If you have worked through La Tagiĝo, Grabowski's 1913 marching song, you have already sung this word: la stela standardo jam flirtas en vent' - the starry banner is already fluttering in the wind. That line is why the word is here at all in the sense the movement uses it. The green flag with the star is a standardo when it is carried on a pole at a congress and a flago when it is a piece of cloth in a shop, and Grabowski wanted the first. Worth a footnote: our 1913 source has la stela standardo where later songbooks often print la verda standardo, so if you have met the song elsewhere the adjective may differ.

The fence between standardo and flago. They are not synonyms and the site does not gloss them the same way. Flago is the everyday word and the default: national flags, the green star flag, a flag on a building, a flag at half mast. Standardo is the formal one - a standard or banner mounted on a staff and carried, the thing a regiment rallies to and a delegation walks behind. Roughly the English pair: every standard is a flag, not every flag is a standard. If you are unsure which you want, you want flago.

No -ard- suffix - see ponardo. The same false seam sits under both words, and it is worth naming twice: bastardo, standardo, bulvardo, ponardo all end alike because French fused a Germanic -hard onto them centuries before Esperanto existed. Esperanto has no -ard- affix. Standard- is one root.

Where it goes next. A pole is a standardstango, the bearer is a standardisto, and the plural in a parade context is the one you will actually meet: la standardoj de la landaj asocioj. The verb English builds from this root - to standardise - is in Esperanto normigi, off normo, and has nothing to do with banners at all.