When you’re an English speaker learning French, one of the best surprises is how many words are cognates—words that look and ...

What is a false cognate? By definition, it is a “word in one language that is similar in form or sound to a word in another language but has a different meaning and is not etymologically related.” As ...

Cognates - words that sound similar in different languages - can be very helpful when learning another lingo. But sometimes they can turn out to be 'false friends' and mean something completely ...

For your protection, here's a list of Spanish-English "false friends." The Spanish words in the first column resemble the English ones in the third column, but have different meanings.

It's a real pain when you have to queue for the 'pain'. Photo: AFP False friends alert! Spare yourself some embarrassment by checking that you know the true meaning of these English-looking words ...

It turns out that there are look-alikes that are even trickier than false friends. They are usually called “fickle friends,” but I think a better name for them is “cunning cognates.” These are words ...