maŭro

Maŭro is a historical term, and it is worth knowing precisely because you will meet it in old books rather than in conversation. It names the Muslim population of North Africa and, above all, of al-Andalus - the Iberia that was governed from Córdoba and Granada between 711 and 1492. Those are the maŭroj of the histories, the builders of the Alhambra and the Mezquita, whose libraries and irrigation and horseshoe arches outlasted the states that made them.

Two things to keep straight. First, it was never an ethnonym anybody used of themselves: Latin Maurus meant a person from Mauretania, and medieval Europe stretched it into a loose label for "Muslim from over there", which is why it covers Berbers, Arabs and Iberian converts indiscriminately. Second, it is dated. For a person today you want arabo, berbero, marokano, or whatever the person actually is; maŭro in a modern sentence reads either as historical writing or as something worse.

The literary sightings are the reason it earns a page. Shakespeare's Othello is "the Moor of Venice", and the play turns on how much of the character his contemporaries thought that one word explained. Verdi kept the label in Otello; so did Rossini before him. In Spanish literature the same word runs from the frontier ballads through Don Quixote, always doing the work of marking an outsider. Read it as a piece of period vocabulary carrying period assumptions, and translate it as "Moor" rather than modernising it away, since the assumptions are usually the point.

For how Esperanto builds nationality and people-words in general - -o for the person, -a for the adjective, -ujo or -io for the country - see countries and peoples.