Pedantle, aka Wordle Shiritori

You say that, but girlfriend and boyfriend are literally just girl friend and boy friend, no?

And as a girl, your girlfriends are just your friends who are girls. Unless you’re a lesbian, in which case your girlfriend is your girlfriend…

Well, in this case I have a lot of boy friends :rofl:

arido (arid, Italian)

I don’t think it works that way :D

In that case, you need male friends or even guy friends.

An extension of the “girls can say girlfriend” thing is that camp gay men will also say “girlfriend”. Just picture some Tiktok with “Excuse ME, girlfriend~!” and comments like “iconic” and “this is a mood”.

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Anyway, arido on the board.

Ardo (I burn, Italian)

bardo (bard, Italian)

pardo

In Latin, this is the dative and ablative singular of pardus, a leopard. The word comes from Greek πάρδος.

pardus became pardo in older Italian. Apparently it eventually fell out of use, so I don’t know what the word is now. In modern Italian, there’s a word gattopardo, which means redundantly “leopard cat”, and that can mean the ocelot or serval. There’s also ghepardo, the cheetah.

English used to have the word pard, but that become leopard: leo + pard = “lion leopard”.

The descendant words could apparently also mean panther, but in Latin a panther was a panthera. Also from Greek – πάνθηρ.

Parto (I leave or childbirth, Italian)

sparto

The Italian name of a kind of grass, called spartum in Latin and esparto in English and Spanish.

Some hints

aparto (I separate, Sp. & Pt.)
sarto (a tailor, Italian)
scarto (I reject, Italian)
spargo (I scatter, Lt. & It.)
spart (he’s saving up, German)
sperto (experience, Esperanto)
sporto (sport, Esperanto)

Sparte (German: section, branch)

Sparta

Spartan (or spartan)

Could be hard. I know there are a couple of follow ups in Latin, at least.

Also an unrelated Esperanto word, that’s a conjugation of one of the hints.

Sparten (plural of what I last posted)

also possible, but a bit of a joke

Spartank. A fuel tank that helps you save fuel. I just made it up. :wink:

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Cats in Italian is gatti, surely? Google translate doesn’t recognize mici as Italian at all.

Also the title of the Italian classic by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, known in English as The Leopard, no?

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Parten

"There are three theorists who are especially important to our understanding of play – Jean Piaget, Mildred Parten, and Lev Vygotsky. "

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Paten (German: godparents)

Otoh: