tolo

The missing base finally arrives, and the loop closes. Seven hundred and forty-seven ranks ago this course taught tolaĵo at 2,251, the linens and the laundry, and had to explain the root in prose because the root itself had no page: tolaĵo is tolo plus -aĵ-, the suffix for a concrete thing made of something. Here is tolo. It is the cloth itself - the woven material, the bolt on the shelf - and tolaĵo is what you make out of it, which then slides, in Esperanto exactly as in English, into meaning the washing. Base and derivative are now both on the site and the pair can be read in either direction.

Linen and canvas are the same word here, and the reason is the weave. Tolo is plain-woven cloth of flax or hemp: fine and white it is linen, coarse and heavy it is canvas or sailcloth. English splits the two by weight and Esperanto does not, so tolo covers the bedsheet, the velo at rank 1,820, the tendo and the painter's stretched canvas alike. If you need to be precise, the adjective does it: fajna tolo, dika tolo, ŝipa tolo.

Against the other cloths in this band and around it.Drapo, three ranks earlier, is heavy woollen broadcloth and is the opposite end of the range - which is what the sentence drapo estas pli varma ol tolo on that page is comparing. Ŝtofo at 2,096 is the general word for fabric of any kind. Lino is the flax plant itself and kanvaso exists for artists' canvas specifically, though most writers just say tolo.

One etymology worth the detour. Latin tela is a web, from texere, to weave. So tolo is family with textile, texture and text - because a text is something woven together - and, less obviously, with toilet: French toilette is a little toile, the cloth laid over a dressing table, and the word travelled from the cloth to the table to the room. The vocabulary of the wash-house has been going round in circles for a very long time.