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examples:

  • Gift (German) = poison
  • poisson (French) = fish
  • embarazada (Spanish) = pregnant
  • sauce (Spanish) = willow
  • triviale (Italian) = vulgar
  • parentes (Portuguese) = relatives
  • slim (Dutch) = smart
Centaurus
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  • According to the MacMillan Dictionary online, False Cognates do not have to have different roots. In addition, the phrase itself "false cognates" points to the idea that we falsely recognize the words.http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/false-cognate – Benjamin Wade Nov 26 '14 at 05:32
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    The most classic Italian false friends are sensibile which looks identical to the English sensible but in Italian means sensitive; and morbido which isn't the English morbid, instead in Italian means soft. – Mari-Lou A Nov 29 '14 at 05:26
  • Famously, the name 'Silver Mist' was hurriedly changed by Rolls Royce to 'Silver Shadow' after someone realised that 'Mist' is the German word for dung. – Edwin Ashworth Feb 11 '15 at 23:22
  • @EdwinAshworth I always thought it was "scheiss". – Centaurus Feb 11 '15 at 23:29
  • @Centaurus: Wrong. And what you wrote is not a German noun. – gnasher729 Apr 12 '15 at 00:00
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    I had to think of Beethoven's pathetic piano sonata, and Tchaikovsky's pathetic 6th symphony... which are both not pathetic at all! – gnasher729 Apr 12 '15 at 00:03
  • @gnasher729 Beethoven's Sonata nº 8 in C minor (aka "pathetic") isn't exactly what I would call a cheerful and jolly piece of music. I think pathetic (causing feelings of sadness or empathy) applies. As for "scheiss", it is a German word meaning "shit". – Centaurus Apr 12 '15 at 00:14
  • @Centaurus: You are wrong. You were thinking of the word "Scheiße" with a capital S because it is a noun and a letter e at the end. You can't learn German from bad TV programs. Calling a peace of music pathetic means it is so bad you feel sorry for the composer or performer. "pathetique" means full of strong emotions. – gnasher729 Apr 12 '15 at 17:15
  • @gnasher729 I’m sorry but there is no such word as “pathetique” in English. It’s a French word and it means “Qui émeut fortement, dont l'intensité dramatique provoque un sentiment de tristesse grave.” which translates as “intensely moving, having such dramatic intensity as to provoke strong sadness”. Of course, in addition to “causing feelings of sadness”, “pathetic”, the English word, also means “bad, weak, poor”, and can be offensive when you say “You are pathetic!” – Centaurus Apr 12 '15 at 18:11
  • @gnasher729 As for “Scheisse”, you are right, I forgot the final “e”, but “ss” is a perfect substitute for “eszett” when you don’t have it on the keyboard. And I certainly didn’t learn French or German from television programs. – Centaurus Apr 12 '15 at 18:11
  • dick (German) – fat – David Pugh Apr 30 '15 at 06:17
  • Some of these things are deeply embedded in the culture. For example, if in Norwegian you say that someone is "spesiell", this is not a compliment; you are calling him eccentric, bizarre. This is an extreme case of tall-poppy syndrome. – David Pugh Apr 30 '15 at 06:26
  • Perhaps German farmers talk about spreading "mist" on their fields, I don't know any. "Mist" is never the expletive, "scheisse" is. – David Pugh Apr 30 '15 at 06:29
  • šukat (Czeck, to fuck) – szukać (Polish, more or less the same pronunciation, to search). Browsing Polish web sites is a source of amusement for many Czechs :) – Honza Zidek Oct 20 '17 at 07:32

1 Answers1

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False friends is the common word for that :)

As Wikipedia says:

False friends are pairs of words or phrases in two languages or dialects (or letters in two alphabets) that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning.

The article goes on to mention one of your actual examples)

False cognates, is something different. If we look again at wikipedia:

False cognates are pairs of words in the same or different languages that are similar in form and meaning but have different roots. That is, they appear to be, or are sometimes considered, cognates, when in fact they are unrelated. This is different from a false friend, which two words may have similar roots but have diverged in meaning.

oerkelens
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    "False cognates" works, too. – Papa Poule Nov 22 '14 at 19:23
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    @PapaPoule: not according to Wikipedia. And fals cognates have a different root anyway, where many false friends actually may share a common root. (Dutch and English slim and German schlimm share a common root and yet have three different meanings (smart, thin and bad)) – oerkelens Nov 22 '14 at 19:28
  • If the question as written had not included any examples (or if at least one of the examples had been a 'true' false cognate), would the best answer have been: “Either ‘false friend’ or ‘false cognate,’ depending on whether the two words have a common root.”?
    Anyway, thanks for pointing out this distinction to me because I had always incorrectly thought that the two were synonymous!     – Papa Poule Nov 22 '14 at 20:19
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    @PapaPoule: false cognates still are similar in meaning, at least following the Wikipedia definition. False friends are dissimilar in meaning, they just look (or) sound alike. – oerkelens Nov 22 '14 at 21:16
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    The loan-phrase "faux-amis" is the one we were taught at school. Is "false friends" a translation of it perhaps? – Francis Davey Nov 23 '14 at 15:50
  • @FrancisDavey: Yes, faux amis is the exact French version of false friends. – oerkelens Nov 23 '14 at 16:08
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    @oerkelens - I guess I was really wondering whether "false friends" was a (new?) Anglicisation of the term. We never used "false friends" when I was growing up. – Francis Davey Nov 23 '14 at 17:26
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    @FrancisDavey I'm not that much younger than you, but I wasn't educated in Anglophonia. But for as long as I can remember the term false friends was used by English speakers to denote this phenomenon. In my case, at home, I was taught about valse vrienden. The term seems to be international a such though. – oerkelens Nov 23 '14 at 21:57
  • Faux-amis appears to be on the rise (in ngram) and more common in the British English corpus, but still very much the minority usage. – Francis Davey Nov 24 '14 at 18:05