Questions tagged [false-friends]

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Is "to have sense/no sense" correct?

A person I know, who is not a native English speaker (just like me, I must add) always uses the expression "to have sense" instead of "to make sense", because in Spanish that expression literally ...
Shinra tensei's user avatar
6 votes
3 answers
2k views

Can "beamer" mean "projector"?

I've lived under the impression that the word beamer is an American slang word for a BMW vehicle and a false friend to German speakers: beamer does not mean projector. Recently though, I heard an ...
Matthias Braun's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
528 views

"Body Leasing": Is it English?

In my country, we sometimes call working arrangements where one company "leases" individual employees to another "body leasing". "Body" and "to lease" are obviously English words of good standing, ...
Johannes Bauer's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
64 views

Correspondence of French "exercice" and English "year/period" in a specialized, economic sense

In French, we use the term exercice to refer to a period of time between two events. We say exercice fiscal for fiscal year, exercice comptable for accounting period, etc. One of the senses given by ...
Martine G.'s user avatar
3 votes
3 answers
687 views

Are "strait" and "straight" related?

Wiktionary describes one of them coming from Latin, and the other from proto-Germanic. Does this mean they're unrelated, even though they're homonyms and both about geometric properties (narrowness ...
Andrew Grimm's user avatar
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4 votes
2 answers
4k views

Is "realize" a synonym for "implement"?

Many of my colleagues use the word realize in the sense of implement (as in "software realization" or "I didn't realize this function") It looks like these are false friends in both French and German. ...
Dmitry Grigoryev's user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
8k views

Is there a proper term for an ex-friend?

Like a term for someone you had a falling out with and no longer associate with? I'm looking for something that doesn't still have the term 'friend' in it.
Casey's user avatar
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0 votes
1 answer
6k views

How to use "in respective of" and how does it compare to "in terms of"? [closed]

How to use the expression "in respective of" and how does it compare to "in terms of"? What is their appropriate usage?
Allen Yang's user avatar
10 votes
1 answer
1k views

Why and how did "a sensible boy" become "intelligent and prudent"?

Italians often get confused by sensible and sensitive. If I tell them He's a sensible boy; he studies hard, saves his money, and plans ahead. They are quite bewildered. To them, sensible is ...
Mari-Lou A's user avatar
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