krokodili.
to speak among Esperantists in a language besides Esperanto, especially one's native language or a language not spoken by everyone present (literally, "to crocodile")
Meaning & usage
to speak among Esperantists in a language besides Esperanto, especially one's native language or a language not spoken by everyone present (literally, "to crocodile")
Where this word comes from
From krokodilo (“crocodile”) + -i. The origin of the expression is unclear. Several suggestions have been made: * From the fact that crocodiles' extremely large mouths make an apt comparison for carelessly flapping one's jaws without consideration. * Ferrari, an Esperantist in Paris in the 1930s, would comment Kion volas tiuj krokodiloj? (What do those crocodiles want?) when noisy non-Esperantists entered the cafe where he was speaking Esperanto with friends. * Students of Andreo Cseh. When Cseh taught Esperanto, students were only allowed to speak their native language when they were holding a wooden crocodile he always brought with him. The latter two may be allusions to the idiom rather than its source.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.