nudelo

A noodle is not a little naked thing, and this needs saying out loud. Nuda is naked or bare, and nudelo starts with all four of its letters. The eye then wants a suffix, and the nearest candidate is the diminutive, so a beginner arrives at "a small bare one" and looks pleased. There is no -el- suffix in Esperanto. The diminutive is -et-, which would give nudeto, and that would indeed be a little naked thing rather than dinner. Nudel- is one root, borrowed from German, and its resemblance to nuda is pure accident of spelling.

Say the plain version of the rule. Esperanto's official affixes are a closed, published list, and anything not on it is at best unofficial no matter how much it looks like one. -Et-, -eg-, -ar-, -ej-, -il-, -ist-, -ul- and the rest are the tools; -el-, -or- and -erl- are not tools at all, and every word in this chapter that seems to use one is a single borrowed root. The one genuine exception is -iv-, real but unofficial and technical, which the unofficial affixes sets out. Checking against the list takes two seconds and saves a wrong guess, and word building has the whole set.

Noodles in the kitchen. Nudelo covers the Italian and the Asian kinds alike, though spagetoj and makaronioj have their own names and pasto is the dough or pasta in general. Nudelsupo is noodle soup, vermiĉeloj are vermicelli, and rizonudeloj are rice noodles. The word is usually plural for the same reason as in English: nudelojn, because you are not going to eat one.