There’s a number of false “bilingual” words. That is, they are coincidentally spelled the same, but are not actually related and have unrelated meanings. Off the top of my head, I can come up with a number of them, all of them between English and another language, but none longer than 4 letters:
Gift (German) means “poison”
pays (French) means “country” or “region”
rang (French) means “line” or “row”
pain (French) means “bread”
stem (Dutch) means “vote”
So anyone know of a longer example? They can be between any two languages, but remember the words do have to be unrelated.
Not the exact spelling, but in Japanese “tako” means octopus. If you go into a Japanese restaurant to order “a taco” you’ll be eating tentacles. (And yes, I realize this is only 4 letters.)
For a 5-letter word, similarly, “ringo” means “apple” in Japanese. Funny coincidence that Apple Records was founded by the Beatles, one of whom was named Ringo.
Found a Quora thread that discusses the same topic and gives a lot of examples. It appears that this general linguistic phenomenon is known as false friends.
From that Quora thread, the longest word I could find is “déception” (meaning “disappointment” in French), with 9 letters, although I’m unsure if that one counts since one of the E’s has an acute accent.
The ion ending in English words is often perhaps even usually from Latin. Divertere is the Latin root for diversion and I’d assume for the Spanish word as well.
Are we sure that’s a false friend, though? One meaning of diversion in English is a recreation or amusement. It’s a fairly similar meaning to fun. Maybe one is a loanword, or maybe they both derive from a common source.
Well, If you speak both speak German and English, you know your false friends like “gift”. Another one is Mist/mist, meaning manure/dung or fog. That’s the reason why the Rolls Royce Silver Mist was called Silver Shadow in the end.
