False friend
words in two languages that sound similar but have very different meanings
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 context of psychology, its meaning was restricted to a particular type of fear described as "a neurotic feeling of anxiety and depression". Also, gymnasium meant both 'a place of education' and 'a place for exercise' in Latin, but its meaning became restricted to the former in German and to the latter in English, making the expressions into false friends in those languages as well as in Ancient Greek, where it started out as 'a place for naked exercise'.
Definition and origin
False friend words are bilingual homophones or bilingual homographs, i.e., words in two or more languages that look similar (homographs) or sound similar (homophones), but differ significantly in meaning. False friend letters are homographic graphemes (written characters) that differ significantly in pronunciation.
The origin of the term is as a shortened version of the expression 'false friend of a translator', the English translation of a French expression (French: faux amis du traducteur) introduced by Maxime Kœssler and Jules Derocquigny in their 1928 book, with a sequel, Autres Mots anglais perfides.
Causes
From the etymological point of view, false friends can be created in several ways.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “False friend” as words in two languages that sound similar but have very different meanings. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as words in two languages that sound similar but have very different meanings. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q202961. The Library of Congress control number is sh85098261. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1928.
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This entry incorporates text from “False friend” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.