korupti

Two readings, and the object tells you which. Korupti covers both the English senses, and Esperanto does not separate them. With a person as the object and money in the sentence, it is to bribe: korupti juĝiston, to bribe a judge. With a person, an institution or an abstract thing as the object and no money, it is to corrupt in the moral sense: la povo koruptas, power corrupts. The second is the older reading and the first is a specialisation of it, which is also the history of the English word. If you need to be unambiguous about the money, subaĉeti (literally to buy from underneath) is the specific verb for bribery, and it is the one a legal text will use.

Register: this is a factual word, not an insult. Korupti and korupta belong to the vocabulary of journalism, law and political description, and they describe an act rather than express an opinion about a person. Korupta registaro is a claim about how a government operates. Esperanto has no softer synonym you can retreat to and no harsher one to escalate to, so the word carries whatever the evidence around it carries. That is a feature: if you are writing about public life in a second language, a vocabulary that does not do your editorialising for you is worth having.

The family, which is bigger than the verb. Korupto and korupteco are corruption as a condition; koruptado is corruption as an ongoing practice, and it is the word for the phenomenon a country has a problem with. Koruptebla is corruptible, nekoruptebla incorruptible, and korupt-afero a corruption case. Note that korupti is transitive throughout: something or somebody does it to something or somebody else. To become corrupt is koruptiĝi, and the igi and iĝi rule applies without exception.

The Latin is worth one line. Rumpere is to break, and cor- here is cum, together, used as an intensifier. To corrupt is to break something thoroughly. English keeps the verb in rupture, erupt, interrupt and bankrupt (a broken bench, from the Italian money-changers' furniture), and Esperanto keeps it in interrompi. Same picture every time: something whole, broken across.