mastrumi

The second real -um- in this band. Mastro is the master of a house, the owner, the host. -Um- says do something in the region of this root and declines to be more specific. So mastrumi is to master-about: to do the things the person in charge of a household does. Cooking, washing, buying, keeping the accounts, keeping the place running. English has to reach for a compound - keep house, run a household - and Esperanto has one verb.

Why no ordinary suffix would have worked. Mastri would mean to master something, which is a different verb. Mastrigi would mean to make somebody the master. The activity of householding is not any regular transformation of the root, it is a bundle of tasks associated with it, and that is precisely the case -um- exists to cover. The -um wildcard has the rest of the family; cerbumi at rank 2,126 is the other genuine one you will meet this chapter.

Mastrumado is the word you will actually need. The -ad- noun names the whole business of household management - domestic work, housekeeping, the running of a home - and it is the standard term in Esperanto for it, including in the slightly official register of hejma mastrumado on a form. Mastrumaĵoj are the chores themselves, mastrumisto and mastrumistino are the housekeeper, and mastrumejo is the utility room. The verb is usually transitive with the household as object (mastrumi la domon) but stands alone happily too, as in the second example.