False friend

In linguistics, a false friend is a word in another language that resembles a word in a given language in spelling or sound but differs significantly in meaning. Examples include English embarrassed and Spanish embarazada, meaning “pregnant”, and English gift compared with German Gift, meaning “poison”. The term was introduced by the 1928 French book Les Faux Amis : ou, Les Trahisons du vocabulaire anglais.

Field: Linguistics
Term introduced: 1928
Example: English embarrassed and Spanish embarazada

Sources and credits

Article: False friend (English Wikipedia)
Wikidata: Q202961
Text: Card text is adapted from the English Wikipedia article by an automated summary. Wikipedia content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for its contributors. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Article history and contributors
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