Spanish inflates what English fits into one syllable: 'corazón' carries an augmentative, as if the heart demands extra breath. Both descend from PIE *ḱerd-, diverging at the Germanic-Latin fork. Chinese 心 (xīn) sidesteps the whole argument — it is heart and mind at once, refusing a split that Western languages built their philosophies around. Zamenhof's 'koro' borrows the Latin root stripped bare: a heart that belongs to no one's history, offered as everyone's word.
Covers both the anatomical organ and the seat of emotion, courage, and memory in English idiom: 'by heart,' 'take heart,' 'lose heart,' 'heartfelt.' Cognate with Latin 'cor' and Greek 'καρδία' through the same PIE root, though the English form arrived via the Germanic branch.
From Vulgar Latin *coratione(m), an expressive augmentation of Latin 'cor' (heart) via the suffix chain -ationem. The augmentative charge is baked into the morphology — 'corazón' is, at its etymological root, an amplified heart.
Oracle-bone inscriptions (~1200 BCE) show a rendering of the heart organ with visible chambers and curved vessels. The modern form retains the essential shape: a curved base with three strokes evoking the organ's lobes. As radical 心, it underlies 思 (sī, to think), 忘 (wàng, to forget), 恨 (hèn, to hate), 愛 (ài, love) — the entire Chinese vocabulary of inner life is rooted in this one pictogram.
心 (xīn) is simultaneously 'heart,' 'mind,' 'intention,' and 'center.' The Chinese tradition never separated cognition from feeling the way Western usage tends to. Key compounds: 心里 (xīn lǐ, 'inside the heart/mind'), 心理 (xīnlǐ, 'psychology,' lit. 'heart-principle'), 心地 (xīndì, 'moral character,' lit. 'heart-ground').
Zamenhof drew the root from the Romance/Latin tradition. Productively extended by Esperanto's regular affixes: 'kora' (adj., cordial, heartfelt), 'koreco' (n., cordiality), 'elkore' (adv., from the heart, sincerely), 'kortuŝi' (v., to move emotionally, lit. to touch the heart).
To name the heart is to decide, before you know it, whether it also thinks.