lipharo

Lip-hair. That is the whole word. Lipo is a lip, haro is a hair, and lipharo is a hair on the lip. Nobody had to be clever. This is Esperanto at its most cheerful: you already knew both halves at rank 656 and rank 539, and the compound costs you nothing but the moment of recognition. English needed to borrow moustache from French, which got it from Italian, which got it from Greek, and after all that travelling it still tells you nothing about what it is.

But mind the number. A lipharo is one hair. The moustache is lipharoj, plural, because it is made of many of them - exactly as English whiskers is plural and a whisker is one. So:

• Li havas lipharojn. - He has a moustache.
• Unu lipharo falis sur la tablon. - One hair from his moustache fell on the table.

The dictionary headword is the singular, which is why this page is lipharo, but the singular is nearly always the wrong word in a sentence about a man's face. Esperanto has a small family of these: okulvitroj, glasses, is plural because there are two lenses; gefratoj is plural because there is more than one sibling. Count the parts and the number follows.

The face vocabulary, together. Barbo is the beard, which grows on the chin and is one word rather than a compound. Vangharoj are side whiskers, from vango, a cheek. Brovo is an eyebrow and okulharo an eyelash, built the same way as this word. Vizaĝo is the face they all sit on, and buŝo is the mouth just underneath.

Derived and useful. Lipharulo is a man with a moustache, using the -ul- person suffix. Senlipharo is not a word; the ordinary way to say clean-shaven is senbarba or glate razita. And lipharoj is also what a cat has, so the whiskers on the animal and the moustache on the man are the same word, which English also manages and for once agrees about.