False friends

False friends (or false cognates) are words that, because they look alike in two languages — or in two varieties of one language — give the illusion of sharing a meaning when in fact their senses diverge. They are among the most stubborn traps in translation and language learning, precisely because the resemblance invites trust. The term calques the French faux amis, coined by Koessler and Derocquigny in 1928.

It is worth separating two labels that tradition tends to blur. A cognate is a word that shares an etymological origin with another; a false friend is any formally similar pair whose meanings do not coincide — whether they share an origin (as most do) or merely look alike by chance. The danger lies not in the kinship but in the semantic drift.

False friends within Portuguese

The same word can mean different things in Portugal and in Brazil. Neither side is wrong: these are parallel shifts of meaning from a shared etymon.

These pairs demand extra care precisely because both speakers believe they are using the “same” language. An innocent sentence in one variety can sound shocking in the other.

False friends with Spanish

Portuguese and Spanish are sister languages with high mutual intelligibility — and it is that very closeness that multiplies false friends, fuelling the portunhol phenomenon. Many pairs result from a single Latin etymon specialising different senses on each side of the border.

Spanish	Looks like…	Actually means
exquisito	esquisito (odd)	exquisite, delicious
oficina	oficina (workshop)	office
largo	largo (wide)	long
salada	salada (salad)	salty
polvo	polvo (octopus)	dust, powder
cena	cena (scene)	dinner
brincar	brincar (to play)	to jump
pegar	pegar (to grab)	to hit, to glue

Note that embaraçar and embarazar go back to the same root, but Castilian narrowed it to “to make pregnant”, while Portuguese kept the sense of “to entangle, to hamper”.

False friends with English

With English, the contact runs mainly through the Latin that both languages inherited, directly or otherwise. Many apparent loanwords are in fact traps: the Latin form survives in both languages with values that have drifted apart.

Some of the most treacherous pairs for anyone translating between the two languages:

English	Looks like…	Actually means
actual / actually	atual / atualmente	real / in fact
eventually	eventualmente	in the end, sooner or later
pretend	pretender	to feign
realize	realizar	to notice, to grasp
assist	assistir	to help
library	livraria	bookshop
parents	parentes	relatives
push	puxar	to pull
exit	êxito	success

The push / puxar reversal is especially famous: pushing an English door marked push is, in Portuguese, doing the opposite of what the look-alike word suggests (puxar means “to pull”).

Why they arise

False friends almost always grow from semantic divergence out of a shared origin: Latin exquisitus (“recherché”) yielded the complimentary Spanish exquisito and the disparaging Portuguese esquisito. In other cases the resemblance is accidental — forms that drew close by chance, with no kinship at all. And there are loanwords that shifted meaning as they were adapted into the receiving language.

The practical lesson is simple and old: when in doubt, distrust the resemblance. The dictionary — not intuition — is the arbiter. For the foreign learner the list of pairs to memorise is finite and well documented; for the translator, the golden rule is never to render an “obvious” word without checking it in context.