false friend
English edit
Etymology edit
Calque of French faux-ami, from the longer phrase faux amis du traducteur (“false friends of a translator”), first used by Maxime Kœssler and Jules Derocquigny in 1928 in their book Les Faux Amis ou les trahisons du vocabulaire anglais (False Friends, or the Pitfalls of the English Vocabulary).[1]
Pronunciation edit
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˌfɒls ˈfɹɛnd/, /ˌfɔːls ˈfɹɛnd/
- (General American) IPA(key): /ˌfɔls ˈfɹɛnd/, /ˌfɑls ˈfɹɛnd/
Audio (US) (file) Audio (AU) (file)
Noun edit
Examples |
---|
|
false friend (plural false friends)
- (linguistics, translation studies, lexicography) A word in a language that bears a deceptive resemblance to a word in another language but in fact has a different meaning.
- Synonym: faux ami
- A word and its false friend may well be etymologically related: in such cases semantic shifts have made them drift apart.
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see false, friend.
Hyponyms edit
Descendants edit
Translations edit
type of word
|
See also edit
- Category:False cognates and false friends, lists of false friends in various languages
- cognate
- false cognate
- misnomer and phantonym (both with intralanguage relevance)
References edit
- ^ Christoph Gutknecht (2001) “Translation”, in Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller, editors, The Handbook of Linguistics, Blackwell Publishers, page 698