In the flat

Near the end of the list stands il portone, and a reader who knows la porta will make two mistakes with it at once. The first is size. -one is the augmentative suffix, so the word looks as though it should mean « a big door », and instead it names one particular door: the street door of a block of flats, the one that shuts at ten. The second mistake is gender. La porta is feminine; il portone is masculine, because in Italian the suffix settles the gender and the base word has no say in it. This list holds two more of these. Il piumone is built on la piuma, the feather, and it is not a large feather but a duvet, and it is masculine. Il campanello is built on la campana, the bell, with the diminutive -ello, and it is not a small bell but the doorbell, and it is masculine too. English has nothing that behaves like this, so the habit has to be built from scratch: read the suffix first, then the stem, and expect a different object rather than a different size.