ŝatokupo

This is one of the small pleasures of the language. A hobby, in Esperanto, is a liking-occupation: ŝati to like, okupo an occupation, joined root to root with no glue at all. Nobody has to tell you what it means; you can read it the first time you meet it, and having read it once you will never need to look it up again.

Compare what English did. A hobby was a hobbyhorse, which was a small horse, and the sense "thing you do for pleasure" arrived through a joke about riding your favourite one. Perfectly charming, entirely opaque, and no help at all to anybody learning the word. Esperanto's compound is the plainer machine, and it is the same machine you already used for ŝatata and okupi.

The compound joins the two roots directly, with no -o- linking vowel: ŝat + okup + o. A linking vowel goes in when the join would otherwise be unpronounceable, and ŝato-kupo would additionally read as a cup, so the tight form is the one that stuck.

You will meet this word in the reading for this chapter. La taglibro is a diary kept by a man whose hobby costs nothing and who has to defend it to his neighbour: sinjorino Berta diras, ke tio ne estas ŝatokupo sed kutimo de maljuna viro. The borrowing hobio also exists and is understood, but ŝatokupo is the word the language built for itself.