subaĉeti

This one is a real seam, and it is a joy. Sub- is the preposition sub, under, doing duty as a prefix. Aĉeti is aĉeti at rank 488, to buy. Put them together and you get to buy under: the transaction that happens beneath the table, out of sight of whoever should have been watching. English needs a word from Old French (bribe, originally a scrap of bread given to a beggar) and Esperanto just describes the act. A learner who has both roots can read subaĉeti correctly on first sight, which is the whole promise of the language delivered in one word.

How it differs from korupti. Korupti at 2,309 is the broad, abstract verb: to corrupt a person, a system, an institution, a text. It covers slow moral rot with no money changing hands. Subaĉeti is the specific act and it always has a price: somebody paid, somebody took. So a regime is koruptita and the individual customs officer was subaĉetita. Keep the two apart and your Esperanto reads like a lawyer's rather than a leader-writer's.

The rest of the family. Subaĉeto is the bribe as an act, subaĉetanto the one doing the buying, subaĉetebla the useful adjective for a person who can be bought. The sub- prefix is productive in exactly this shady direction: subskribi is to sign (write underneath) and is perfectly innocent, but subpremi is to oppress and subfosi is to undermine. Esperanto has quietly decided that under is where the trouble lives.