peruko

The English word is the tail end of this one. French perruque came into English as periwig, and two centuries of hurried speech sanded off everything before the w, leaving wig. Esperanto took the French word whole and unclipped, so a learner meeting peruko for the first time is meeting the full version of a word they have used all their life. The root itself is respectably obscure: most accounts trace it back to Latin pilus, a hair, though the path is disputed enough that dictionaries hedge.

A century ago this was ordinary vocabulary. The corpus this list is drawn from runs from 1887 to about 1930, and a peruko in that period is a costume piece, a legal or theatrical prop, or the badly kept secret of a bald man - not the medical or cosmetic object it more often is now. The great age of the thing was earlier still: the powdered court wig of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, worn by men who had perfectly good hair underneath, purely because rank required a shape that hair could not make on its own. Every buklo of it was set by somebody else.

The words around it are all buildable. Perukisto is the wigmaker, perukujo the box or stand it lives on, and senperuka is what a man is the moment it comes off. And note what the thing is good for in fiction: a peruko changes the silhouette of a head, which is the outline people read a human being by. Put a white one on an old woman at the far end of a moonlit garden and she stops being an old woman, which is precisely the job it does in la plenluno - white as flour, out of a costume box nobody has ever asked about.