Etymology

false friend

Today it means: A word in a language that bears a deceptive resemblance to a word in another language but in fact has a different meaning. Full definition →

French faux-ami
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The story

  1. French · calque offaux-ami
  2. English todayfalse friend

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).

Words from the same roots

Frenchfaux-ami all →

faux ami

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.