The Spanish for “to break”, romper, has a curious English cousin: corruption.
Corrupt comes from the Latin root com- (which just intensifies the following phrase) plus the Latin rumpere, meaning “to break” — just like the almost-identical Spanish romper (unsurprisingly, since the Spanish is descended from the Latin).
The connection is obvious if we see the unchanged r‑m-p root in both words.
That which is corrupt, after all, is — definitionally — just broken.
