cindro

Cinderella is this word, and she comes apart on the page. Cindrulino is cindro plus -ul- plus -in- plus -o: ash, then the person-of-that suffix, then the female suffix. The girl of the ashes. English hides the same idea under a French borrowing and a folk spelling; Esperanto puts it in the open, so a learner who has met cindro and the affixes for people can read the name of the most famous fairy tale in Europe without being told it. That is the case for the affix system in one word, and it is why the Zamenhof-era translators of Grimm and Andersen had so little trouble.

What it means when there is no princess. Cindro is what a fire leaves: the grey powder in the grate, the ash of a cigarette, the ashes of the dead. It is usually singular where English says ashes, because it is a mass rather than a count - nur cindro restis, only ash remained. Cindrujo is an ashtray (-uj-, the container suffix), cindrigi is to reduce something to ash, and cindriĝi is what the thing itself does. Ash Wednesday is Cindra merkredo.

Not to be confused with polvo or fumo. Polvo is dust, which has not necessarily burnt; fumo is smoke, which is still on its way up. Cindro is specifically what is left. The idiom survives in Esperanto as in English: el la cindro leviĝi, to rise from the ashes, and cindro kaj polvo for what we all come to.