What is "false cognate"

n. 1 A word that appears to be cognate to – that is, to have a shared linguistic origin with – a given word, but that is in fact unrelated. 2 (context sometimes proscribed English) A ''false friend'', a word that appears to have the same meaning as a given word, but that does not.

False cognates are pairs of words that seem to be cognates because of similar sounds and meaning, but actually have different etymologies; they can be within the same language or from different languages. That is different from false friends, which may in fact be related but have different meanings.

Even though false cognates lack a common root, there may still be an indirect connection between them (for example by phono-semantic matching or folk etymology).

As an example of false cognates, the Spanish word haber sounds and looks similar to the English word have, but are in fact unrelated.