False friends are words that look or sound like a word you already know but mean something else. The term usually describes two languages, but English has plenty of false friends of its own: pairs such as affect and effect that trip up native speakers too. A list of common pairs is at the end of this article.
False friends between languages
Usually, a false friend is a word in a foreign language that a learner confuses with a similar word in their mother tongue. The two words look or sound alike, but their meanings are completely different. A classic example: an English speaker in Spain who wants to say "I am embarrassed" and says estoy embarazada has just announced a pregnancy. In the same way, German Gift means "poison", not "present".
Learning a new language is fun, for the students and for everyone around them, and false friends are part of that fun: they are behind many classroom jokes. Which words are false friends depends on the speaker's mother tongue, so every learner has a list of their own.
False friends in your own language
There is another kind of false friend, one that can seem like a best buddy even in your mother tongue. Some English words confuse even native speakers because they are so similar. This happens most with words that are not part of everyday conversation, and in speech they can simply slip out. The result can be funny or embarrassing, depending on the situation: the wrong word can make a native speaker look foolish.
Listeners may not even notice some mix-ups, because the two words sound almost the same, like affluent and effluent or desert and dessert. Others are plainly wrong and can lead to serious misunderstandings, because the two words mean nearly the opposite, like prescribe (to order or recommend) and proscribe (to forbid).
False friends in writing
Written English has many words that are easy to mix up, and each mix-up changes the meaning of a text. This is a particular risk when you dictate with speech recognition software. If you say their and the software writes there, a spell checker may not notice, because both are real, correctly spelled words. If the mistake is not marked, the document goes out telling a different story from the one you meant.
Even a good grammar checker can have a hard time with these mistakes, because the sentence may be perfectly correct from a grammar point of view: the error is in the meaning. The AI Spell Checker reads whole sentences, so it also catches many real words in the wrong place, but your own careful read is still the best protection.
Your best false friends
Watch out for these words, which look or sound alike but mean different things:
- A: accept / except, adapt / adept / adopt, advice / advise, affect / effect, affluent / effluent, allude / elude, allusion / illusion, alternate / alternative, amend / emend, ante- / anti-, appraise / apprise, aural / oral
- B and C: biannual / biennial, climactic / climatic, complacent / complaisant, conscience / conscious
- D and E: defuse / diffuse, desert / dessert, ensure / insure, envelop / envelope
- F to I: flaunt / flout, flounder / founder, historic / historical, ingenious / ingenuous, intense / intensive
- L: lay / lie, lightening / lightning, loath / loathe, loose / lose
- P and R: personal / personnel, precede / proceed, prescribe / proscribe, rout / route
- S to W: sceptic / septic, there / their / they're, venal / venial, wander / wonder, weather / whether
Many of these pairs are explained one by one in easily confused words. For words that sound the same but are spelled differently, see the homophone entry in the dictionary.