saludos
ES [saˈluðos] · Spanish for “greetings” · built on salud (“health”), as Czech pozdravy is on zdraví
I signed off emails with saludos for about a year before I looked at the thing properly. It is the ordinary Spanish closer, the greetings you put above your name, and I had filed it away as a word in its own right.
Then the salud fell out of it - the same salud people say over a sneeze, health. I had been ending letters with healths, plural, like a man dispensing small medical blessings. Czech has been doing the same to me since childhood and I had not spotted it there either.
Spanish saludo comes off salud, health, and that from Latin salus. Greeting somebody meant wishing them well, so a saludo is a small piece of health passed across. Czech reached the identical idea from a root with no Latin in it anywhere. Pozdrav is built on zdraví, health, from zdravý, healthy, out of an old Slavic word for sound and unbroken. English used to do this too and mostly let it go. To hail someone comes from a Norse word for whole and healthy, and wassail was a toast that meant be in good health. The habit faded here and stayed put in the other two.