See false cognate on Wiktionary
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"text": "False cognates are words in different languages that are similar in form and meaning but have different roots. They appear to have a common linguistic origin (regardless of meaning) but actually do not. [...] The two terms, \"false cognates\" and \"false friends,\" are sometimes used incorrectly or interchangeably by some teachers[. ... Learn to] recognize false cognates, which are pairs of words in different languages that are similar in form and meaning but have different roots.",
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"ref": "2011, Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, “Motherland”, in Y: The Last Man: The Deluxe Edition Book 5, page 36:",
"text": "I don't speak Chinese, but \"Mama\" is a false cognate, means the same thing in English, Swahili, Navajo--",
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"ref": "2012, Pedro J. Chamizo-Domínguez, Semantics and Pragmatics of False Friends, →ISBN, page 3:",
"text": "Conversely, the Italian word cazzo [cock, penis] and the Spanish word cazo [ladle, small saucepan] would be false friends and false cognates inasmuch as their respective meanings are different; additionally, there is not any etymological [...] common root for both words. This makes the set of false friends wider than the set of false cognates, since all false cognates are false friends, but not all false friends are false cognates.",
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"text": "False cognates, on the other hand, are words in two languages that are identical or similar in form and may mislead the bilingual to think that they have the same or similar meaning, while their meaning is actually different, e.g., become-bekommen in English-German, […]",
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"(proscribed) 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)."
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Download raw JSONL data for false cognate meaning in All languages combined (3.4kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-12-29 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-12-20 using wiktextract (cdfa371 and 9905b1f). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.