ŝafido

Sheep plus offspring, and the flood starts here.Ŝafo at rank 1,350 is a sheep. The suffix -id- means the young of. Ŝafido is a lamb, and you did not have to learn a new word to know that.

English pays full price for every animal's young: sheep and lamb, cow and calf, pig and piglet, deer and fawn, horse and foal. Every one is a separate memorisation. Esperanto charges you one suffix, once, and then hands you the entire set for free. This is the single most persuasive thing the language does for a beginner, and this rank band is where you watch it happen.

The -id- family in this chapter, in order. Ŝafido is the first of a run, and the neighbours are worth naming so you see the pattern rather than three unrelated words:

• ŝafido (2,613) - lamb, from ŝafo
• hundido (2,628) - puppy, from hundo
• bovido (2,681) - calf, from bovo

The precedents are already on the site: kokido at 2,561 is a chick, and reĝido at 2,542 is a king's son. That last one is the reminder that -id- is not only for animals. It is descent in general: Izraelidoj are the children of Israel, and Atreidoj the sons of Atreus, which is exactly where the suffix came from.

Two things it does not mean. -id- is offspring, not smallness. A small sheep is malgranda ŝafo; -et- is the diminutive and ŝafeto is a little sheep or a term of endearment, not a lamb. And the meat is ŝafidaĵo - the -aĵ- suffix does the work of turning an animal into a dish, exactly as it does in bovaĵo for beef.

The register it carries. Lambs come loaded in every European language, and Esperanto is no exception: la Ŝafido in a religious text is the Lamb, and milda kiel ŝafido is as mild as a lamb. Zamenhof's Bible translation put the word into wide circulation early, which is part of why it sits this high in a list built from pre-1930 prose.