Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of tuko
Coloured illustration of tuko
#1839 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

cloth; kerchief, scarf

Word origin

From German Tuch, a cloth, one of Esperanto's small stock of Germanic roots. It is unrelated to the Latin family that gave textile and texture.

Origin
German
Root
Tuch
English cognates
towel

Examples

.

She covered the table with a white cloth.

.

He wears a red scarf around his neck.

.

The cloth is clean and dry.

is a finished piece of cloth with a job: a tablecloth, a handkerchief, a headscarf, a towel. It is not fabric by the metre - that is - and it is not the woven material in the abstract, which is teksaĵo. If you can pick it up and it has edges, it is a .

Which kind you mean is settled by a compound, and this is one of the most productive little families in the language: tablotuko (tablecloth), naztuko (handkerchief), kaptuko (headscarf), koltuko (neck scarf), bantuko (bath towel), viŝtuko (tea towel), littuko (bed sheet). Learn the pattern rather than the list, because it generates the ones you have not met yet.

Bare on its own is perfectly good when the context is obvious - somebody at a table asking for wants the tablecloth - but reach for the compound whenever a listener might picture the wrong rectangle.

Where this fits

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Esperanto · Free printables

tuko: worksheet, infographic and listicle

Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "tuko" (cloth; kerchief, scarf): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.

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This word is part of lesson 37.