rubando

Closing a loop the course opened six hundred ranks ago. The rubo page, rank 2,056, warned you that this word was coming, because rubo is rubbish, refuse and rubble, and rubando is a strip of pretty silk. Four shared letters, no shared ancestor: rubo is Germanic and rubando came through French from Dutch. A rubujo is a bin and a rubando is what you tie round a present, so the syllable on the end is carrying the entire difference. That page listed five unrelated words beginning rub-; with this one and rublo at 2,076 now both on the site, two of the five are yours, and the rule it drew still holds: read the whole word.

What counts as one. Any long narrow flexible strip: the thing round a donaco, the band on a ĉapelo, a decoration worn on a chest, and by extension the tape in an old machine, magnetofona rubando. A rubandeto is a little one and a rubandi would be to ribbon something, though you will more often see ligi per rubando, to tie with a ribbon.

A note on the idiom. The blue riband, la blua rubando, means the same thing in Esperanto as it does in English: the highest prize in a field. That is one of the small, quiet borrowings that make the language easier than it has any right to be, and it comes free with the word.