false-friends (or false friends , without hyphen) are words in two different Langue S which have a great similarity of form but from which the significances are different.

When they have certain joint meanings, they are partial false-friends . For example, in Italian, ricetta mean “receipt (of kitchen)”, but also “ordinance (medical)”, just like Rezept in German.

From the etymological point of view, the reasons of the existence of false-friends are plural:

Related words

A language has borrows a word from a language B. Later, the word changes direction in the language B. Or two different languages use the same term resulting from another language, but each one in a different direction. A speaker of the language has risk to fall into the trap from the false-friend when he learns the language B and meets the word in question.

One can distinguish the “strict false-friends” and the “partial false-friends”.

  • the “strict false-friends” have a different direction in spite of appearances. For example, in English, opportunity means occasion (good moment to do something) and not opportunity (this is convenient to do something). An example easier to include/understand is actually , which means in the facts (in the acts), whereas currently currently is said.
  • the “partial false-friends” have in a certain case an equivalent direction and in others a different direction. Thus, in English, diary can mean the same thing as in French (management tools of time) or many objectives (what is marked on the diary).

Wrongfully related words

In certain cases, the false-friends are only Homonyme S which do not have any report/ratio. The homonymy (or sometimes the homophony) is only one sheer coincidence. For example, the English gold “or”, the Russian он one “it” and the German Rat “council”, are homonyms and fortuitous homophons of words French without any report/ratio. For statistical simple reasons, these coincidences more often appear on words with a low number of letters. One even says that there exists a word present in all the languages of the world, but which forever the same direction

Related articles

By language

Lists

  • False-friends in English
  • False-friends in Spanish

Friendly truths

  • True English friends
  • True Italian friends

External bonds

  • Bibliography on the false-friends
  • List of false-friends and Anglicisms
  • the False-Friend

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