torĉo

Fire on a stick, and the word says so. A torĉo is a burning brand: a twisted cord or a wooden shaft dipped in resin, wax or pitch, carried to give light. ReVo's definition is exactly that, and its examples are fishermen working at sea by torchlight and the torchlit processions of nineteenth-century Europe. The Latin root means to twist, which is a description of the manufacture - a torch is a thing you plait.

The honest bit: it is not the thing in your pocket. This is where English speakers go wrong and where you should not. In English, torch drifted onto the electric lamp during the twentieth century, so a British reader asked for a torch reaches for a battery. Esperanto never made that move. ReVo's torĉo entry cross-references poŝlampo - literally pocket-lamp, a lampo you carry - and that is the word for a flashlight. Poŝlampo owns the electric sense outright. If you say donu al mi torĉon you have asked for a flaming brand, and in most rooms that is not what you wanted.

The parallel to hold on to: a torĉo is to a poŝlampo what a kandelo is to a lampo. Flame against filament.

The figurative sense is alive and slightly grand. Passing the torch works in Esperanto as it does everywhere - transdoni la torĉon - and Esperanto movement writing uses it for one publication taking over from another. Torĉportanto is a torchbearer. Torĉingo or torĉujo is the bracket on a wall that holds one, which is the sort of word you meet in a castle description and can read at sight: -ing- is the suffix for a socket a thing sits in, the same one behind kandelingo and plumingo.

Where you will meet it. Torchlight is a night word, and it is the light this chapter's story walks by: in La plenluno a family sets out after dark with torĉoj in hand and then finds it has no need of them, because the moon is doing the work. No lumo but the flame you are carrying and whatever is above the path.