estanco
ES [esˈtaŋko] · in Spain, the licensed tobacco shop · sounds like Czech stánek (a stall)
I met estanco written above a door, in small gold letters next to the maroon Tabacos sign, and my Czech brain filed it instantly: a stánek, a kiosk, the thing you buy a sausage from at a Christmas market. Close enough that I didn’t question it for weeks. It is a shop, and it is small, so nothing about it argued back. What it actually is, is the state’s tobacco counter - the only place licensed to sell you cigarettes, and while you’re there, stamps and lottery tickets. Worth knowing that the word travels badly: in parts of Latin America an estanco is where you buy liquor instead.
Dig under both words and you land on the same idea: standing. Spanish estanco comes from estancar, “to dam up, to hold the flow back,” most likely from Vulgar Latin *stanticare, built on Latin stare, “to stand” - which is also why an estanque is a pond and why a compartimento estanco is watertight. Tobacco was a crown monopoly, so it was a género estancado, a good whose sale was held back for the state, and the shop licensed to sell it became el estanco. Czech stánek is the diminutive of stan, a tent, from Proto-Slavic *stanъ, a standing-place or camp, off the verb stát, “to stand.” One family put the standing into stopped water, the other into a little structure you stand up in a square.