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Line drawing of uniformo
Coloured illustration of uniformo
#2031 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

uniform (the clothing)

Word origin

From Latin uniformis, of one form, built from unus, one, and forma, shape. The clothing sense came through French uniforme in the eighteenth century, when armies started dressing their regiments alike.

Origin
Latin, via French
Root
unus + forma
English cognates
uniform, unify

Examples

.

The soldiers wore blue uniforms.

.

The children do not wear a uniform at our school.

.

His uniform was clean and new.

Here is a seam that is real in Latin and false in Esperanto, which is the trickiest kind. The word genuinely was built from unus plus forma, one shape, and the meaning follows perfectly: everybody wearing the same thing. But that building happened in Latin, centuries before Esperanto existed, and the word arrived here whole.

The proof is in the pieces. Esperanto has formo, so half the parse works, but the other half does not: - is not an Esperanto morpheme. The number one is , and a word built inside the language would have to say unuforma, which in fact exists and means uniform in the sense of unvarying, all of one kind. So you get two words from the same Latin idea: unuforma built here, imported ready-made. This is the inspiri class, where the international word carries a derivation that Esperanto could have performed itself and did not need to.

In practice is the garment: the soldier's, the nurse's, the schoolchild's. For the abstract sense use unuforma or a, and note that uniforma also circulates for uniform in the mathematical or statistical sense.

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Esperanto · Free printables

uniformo: worksheet, infographic and listicle

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This word is part of lesson 41.