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false cognate

noun

Definitions

  1. A word that appears to be cognate (etymologically related) to another given word, but in…

    A word that appears to be cognate (etymologically related) to another given word, but in fact is not.

    • I don't speak Chinese, but "Mama" is a false cognate, means the same thing in English, Swahili, Navajo--

  2. A false friend

    A false friend: a word that appears to have the same meaning as another given word, but in fact does not (without regard to whether or not the two terms are cognate).

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for false cognate. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA