When you’re learning a new language, you want all the help you can get! And while you may already know about false cognates and loanwords that have taken on a different meaning, there’s another category of words whose looks can be deceiving: These 8 word pairs look alike and share the same meaning, but their histories are surprisingly separate!
8 lookalike words to watch out for:
- English much and Spanish mucho
- English island and French île
- Japanese emoji (絵文字) and English emoticon
- Spanish usted and Arabic 2ustaadh (أستاذ)
- Italian ciao and Vietnamese chào
- German Feuer and French feu
- Spanish dios and Greek theós (θεός)
- English have and Portuguese haver
English much and Spanish mucho
Both mean: much, a lot The real story: English and Spanish are both Indo-European languages and they share plenty of similar words. Usually, that means that the words came from the same source, but that isn’t the case for much and mucho! Much comes from Proto-Germanic (the ancestor language of English, German, and Dutch, among others) and looked like myċel in Old English, while mucho comes from the Latin multus.
English island and French île
Both mean: island The real story: This pair may be especially surprising if you know that English got a lot of its vocabulary from French, or that the little hat on the “î” in île, called a circumflex, often means that the word used to have an “s”! This means that île used to be spelled isle (where English gets the word isle, too!), but it comes from the Latin insula, while island comes from Old English īeġland. This means that even the similarities between the English words island and isle are a coincidence!
Japanese emoji (絵文字) and English emoticon
Both mean: a text-based representation of moods or reactions The real story: Who remembers when we were limited to expressing ourselves with the likes of ;) and :’( in our texts and emails? When emoji became widespread in the 2010s, many people mistakenly assumed that the words emoji (from Japanese 絵文字) and emoticon were related—but they aren’t! 絵文字 is made up of the characters 絵 (e), meaning picture, and 文字 (moji), meaning character, while emoticon is a portmanteau of the words emotion and icon.
Spanish usted and Arabic 2ustaadh (أستاذ)
Both are: a way to show respect or formality The real story: Even though they sound similar—and even though Spanish has lots of influence from Arabic—these words have completely different histories: Usted is a pronoun, and it comes from a shortened version of vuestra merced, literally your mercy. Meanwhile, أستاذ (2ustaadh) is an honorific title that comes from Persian, where it originally meant master or teacher, and today it can be used to address university professors, or anyone who is a master in their field.
Italian ciao and Vietnamese chào
Both mean: hello and goodbye The real story: Not every language has a word that can function as a greeting and a farewell! But even though ciao and chào have this dual role in common and nearly-identical pronunciations, that’s where the similarities end: Italian ciao comes from a longer Venetian phrase, s-ciào vostro, meaning I am your servant (s-ciào comes from Latin sclavus, meaning slave), while Vietnamese chào is thought to come from the Chinese 朝 (cháo), which historically served as a greeting for elders or authority figures.
German Feuer and French feu
Both mean: fire The real story: German and French are both Indo-European languages that have had lots of contact with each other for many, many centuries, so they do have plenty of words with shared histories—but not Feuer and feu! Feuer comes from Proto-Germanic, and looked like fiur in Old High German, and is related to English fire. Meanwhile, feu came from Latin focus, which meant hearth!
Spanish dios and Greek theós (θεός)
Both mean: god The real story: Spanish—like all Romance languages—comes from Latin, and Latin borrowed heavily from Ancient Greek, so it wouldn’t be too surprising for dios and θεός (theós) to have a shared history! Not only that, but anyone who’s familiar with Spanish pronunciation knows that the “d” sound is often pronounced a lot like a “th,” similar to the sound that “θ” (theta) makes. However, dios (along with the word divine) both come from the Proto-Indo-European root *diew‑, meaning celestial or shining, while θεός has been traced back to a different Proto-Indo-European root, *dhē‑, which meant to put or to place.
English have and Portuguese haver
Both mean: to have The real story: English words have a long history of ending up in Romance languages and vice versa, so thinking that the similarities between have and haver are more than a coincidence would be a reasonable assumption! But have comes from a Proto-Indo-European word that meant to seize and probably looked like *habjaną in Proto-Germanic, while haver can be traced back to an unrelated Latin word habēre, meaning to grasp. The same is true of German haben and Spanish haber, which also both mean to have and look suspiciously similar to each other, but while haben is related to have and haber is related to haver, haben and haber have no shared history with one another!
Confused? I don’t blame you! Here’s another way to visualize the way have, haben, haber, and haver evolved:
Things aren’t always what they seem
Cognates and loanwords are an excellent way to boost your learning, but some words that look alike and share a similar meaning are just happy coincidences. But no matter how they got there, they’re still bonus vocabulary, and that means one less word you’ll have a hard time remembering! 😅
