In historical linguistics, cognates, also called lexical cognates, are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have very radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and often it takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether lexemes are cognate or not.
In linguistics, a false friend is either of a pair of words in different languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning. Examples include the English embarrassed and the Spanish embarazada ("pregnant"); English parents and Portuguese parentes and Italian parenti ; English bribe and French bribe ("crumb"); English gift and German Gift ("poison"), and Norwegian gift ("married").
False cognates are pairs of words that seem to be cognates because of similar sounds and meaning, but have different etymologies; they can be within the same language or from different languages, even within the same family. For example, the English word dog and the Mbabaram word dog have exactly the same meaning and very similar pronunciations, but by complete coincidence. Likewise, English much and Spanish mucho came by their similar meanings via completely different Proto-Indo-European roots, and English "have" and Spanish "haber" are similar in meaning but come from different Proto-Indo-European roots. This is different from false friends, which are similar-sounding words with different meanings, but which may in fact be etymologically related.
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be replaced by another in a sentence without changing its meaning. Words are considered synonymous in only one particular sense: for example, long and extended in the context long time or extended time are synonymous, but long cannot be used in the phrase extended family. Synonyms with exactly the same meaning share a seme or denotational sememe, whereas those with inexactly similar meanings share a broader denotational or connotational sememe and thus overlap within a semantic field. The former are sometimes called cognitive synonyms and the latter, near-synonyms, plesionyms or poecilonyms.
A homograph is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. However, some dictionaries insist that the words must also be pronounced different, while the Oxford English Dictionary says that the words should also be of "different origin". In this vein, The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography lists various types of homographs, including those in which the words are discriminated by being in a different word class, such as hit, the verb to strike, and hit, the noun a blow.
Polysemy is the capacity for a sign to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses.
Wyrd is a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny. The word is ancestral to Modern English weird, which retains its original meaning only dialectically.
The Greek language has contributed to the English lexicon in five main ways:
Dunglish is a popular term for an English spoken with a mixture of Dutch. It is often viewed pejoratively due to certain typical mistakes that native Dutch speakers, particularly those from the Netherlands, make when speaking English. The term is first recorded in 1965, with other colloquial portmanteau words including Denglish, Dutchlish (1986), and Dinglish (2003).
Although English is a Germanic language, it has Latin influences. Its grammar and core vocabulary are inherited from Proto-Germanic, but a significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources. A portion of these borrowings come directly from Latin, or through one of the Romance languages, particularly Anglo-Norman and French, but some also from Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; or from other languages into Latin and then into English. The influence of Latin in English, therefore, is primarily lexical in nature, being confined mainly to words derived from Latin and Greek roots.
In etymology, two or more words in the same language are called doublets or etymological twins or twinlings when they have different phonological forms but the same etymological root. Often, but not always, the words entered the language through different routes. Given that the kinship between words that have the same root and the same meaning is fairly obvious, the term is mostly used to characterize pairs of words that have diverged at least somewhat in meaning. For example, English pyre and fire are doublets with merely associated meanings despite both descending ultimately from the same Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word *péh₂ur.
The following articles list English words that share certain features in common.
The word witch derives from the Old English nouns ƿiċċa[ˈwittʃɑ] and ƿiċċe[ˈwittʃe]. The word's further origins in Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European are unclear.
Rebracketing is a process in historical linguistics where a word originally derived from one set of morphemes is broken down or bracketed into a different set. For example, hamburger, originally from Hamburg+er, has been rebracketed into ham+burger, and burger was later reused as a productive morpheme in coinages such as cheeseburger. It is usually a form of folk etymology, or may seem to be the result of valid morphological processes.
Present-day Irish has numerous loanwords from English. The native term for these is béarlachas, from Béarla, the Irish word for the English language. It is a result of bilingualism within a society where there is a dominant, superstrate language and a minority substrate language with few or no monolingual speakers and a perceived "lesser" status.
In etymology, back-formation is the process of creating a new lexeme by removing actual or supposed affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation, a term coined by James Murray in 1889.
An interlingual homograph is a word that occurs in more than one written language, but which has a different meaning or pronunciation in each language. For example word "done" is an adjective in English, a verb in Spanish and a noun in Czech.
