mansaketo

Three pieces, and you can hear all three. Mano plus sako plus -et-. Hand, bag, little. A hand-bag-let. English got there with two of the three and left the size out; Esperanto puts it in, and the diminutive is not decoration, because a mansako without it would be a holdall you carry by hand rather than the thing that goes over a shoulder with a purse in it.

Read -et- properly and the family opens up. Sako is a sack, the big coarse thing flour comes in. Saketo is a little bag: a paper bag, a tea bag, a sachet. Put man- on the front and you have narrowed it to the one you carry about with you. The same suffix gives domo to dometo, a cottage, and rideti from ridi, to smile rather than laugh, and the size and people affixes article walks through the pattern.

The British and American words diverge, and Esperanto follows the British one. A handbag is a mansaketo. What Americans call a purse is the same object; what the British call a purse, the small thing that holds coins, is monujo, a money-container, built with -uj- rather than -et-. Getting these crossed is a live source of confusion in English and Esperanto sidesteps it by naming each object after what it is made of and for.

Other things sako builds. Dorsosako is a rucksack, a back-bag. Sakstrato is a cul-de-sac, a bag-street, which is the same metaphor French uses and rather more polite than the French words literally say. Dormosako is a sleeping bag. The root is productive and none of these needed a dictionary entry to be readable.