False friend

Uncommon card · No. 163010

In linguistics, a false friend is a word in a different language that looks or sounds similar to a word in a given language, but differs significantly in meaning. Examples of false friends include English embarrassed and Spanish embarazada ('pregnant'); English parents versus Portuguese parentes and Italian parenti (the latter two both meaning 'relatives'); English demand and French demander ('ask'); and English gift, German Gift ('poison'), and Norwegian gift (both 'married' and 'poison'). The term was introduced by a French book, Les Faux Amis : ou, Les Trahisons du vocabulaire anglais (False friends: or, the betrayals of English vocabulary), published in 1928. As well as producing completely false friends, the use of loanwords often results in the use of a word in a restricted context, which may then develop new meanings not found in the original language. For example, Angst means 'fear' in a general sense (as well as 'anxiety') in German, but when it was borrowed into English in the...

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