muelisto

Two pieces, and the base is still missing. Muel- is the root of mueli, to grind or to mill, and -ist- is the suffix for a trade: instruisto a teacher, kuracisto a doctor, muelisto a miller. Straightforward. What is not straightforward is that mueli itself still has no page in this course, and this is now the second word built on it that does: muelejo, the mill, arrived at rank 2,630, and the miller arrives here at 2,755. The verb they are both built from does not reach the top three thousand roots on its own.

That happens more often than you would think, and it is worth stating plainly rather than papering over: an activity can be named far more often than it is described. People talk about the mill and the miller; almost nobody says grinds. Learn mueli from these two pages, because it is the base of the whole family: muelilo is the grinder or the machine (a kafmuelilo grinds coffee), muelŝtono is the millstone, and mueli is freely figurative for grinding an argument to dust.

The trade, in order. The kamparano brings the greno, the muelisto turns it into faruno at the muelejo, and the baker turns that into pano. Three trades, one chain, and Esperanto builds every name on it from a root plus -ist-.

A note on -ist- against -ul-. A muelisto mills for a living. A muelulo, if anybody said it, would be a person characterised by milling somehow, which is not a thing. Keep -ist- for occupations and convictions (esperantisto, socialisto) and -ul- for a quality made into a person (riĉulo, junulo).