eksigi

Two affixes, no root, one verb. Eks- is the prefix of the former: eksedzo is an ex-husband, eksprezidanto a former president. -Ig- is the causative: it makes something so. Bolt them together with nothing in the middle and you get eksigi, to make somebody an ex, which in a working life means to sack them. Esperanto lets a prefix and a suffix shake hands directly and treats the result as an ordinary verb. No national language can do that, and it is one of the plainest demonstrations of why the affix system is worth learning properly.

The pair with eksiĝi is the whole lesson. That word arrived at rank 2,789, a hundred and fifty ranks ago, and it is the same build with -iĝ- instead of -ig-. One letter apart, opposite in meaning, and the difference is entirely a matter of who did it:

• eksigi - transitive, -ig-. Somebody else acts on you. La estraro eksigis ŝin. The board sacked her.
• eksiĝi - intransitive, -iĝ-. You act on yourself. Ŝi eksiĝis. She resigned.

English marks this with two entirely different verbs, sack and resign, and a passive construction for the third case. Esperanto marks it with a single letter, which is either elegant or dangerous depending on how carefully you are listening. Ŝi estis eksigita is she was dismissed; ŝi eksiĝis is she went of her own accord; and getting those two the wrong way round in a news report is the kind of mistake that ends up in a correction column. The igi and iĝi article is the full treatment, and this pair is the best single example in it.

The rest of the working-life vocabulary.Dungi at 1,366 is the opposite act, to hire. Maldungi is its own straightforward antonym and is used interchangeably with eksigi, though eksigi sounds slightly more like removal from an ofico and maldungi more like the end of a paid job. Eksigo is the dismissal itself, eksiĝo the resignation, and posteno at 1,112 is the post you lose either way.