What term means "words that look alike and mean alike, across two languages"?

There are several reasons why words in two languages might sound and mean similarly.

  1. One (or both) of the words may be borrowed,
    like radio, curry, or tea, in many unrelated languages.
  2. One of the words may be a descendant from the same source as the other,
    like Spanish articles el, la and Italian articles il, la.
    (Words related like this are called Cognates < Lat co-g(e)natus 'born together')
  3. It may simply be an accident,
    like English hole and Yucatec Maya /ho:l/ 'hole', or Latin dua '2' and Malay duwa '2'.
    It is estimated that any two languages have around half-a-dozen such pairs, on the average,
    and they provide no evidence for anything except the vagaries of lexical sound and meaning.

In any event, there is no term that covers all and only these phenomena.


I feel what you're asking has nothing to do with "cognates". "Cognates" is a highly technical term relating of the origin of words.

I believe you're simply asking "what the hell do you call it when the word is the same in two languages?"

Surprisingly I think there is no word for such a thing and that's the answer.

{Going back to cognates. Say there was a word, X, for what you ask. Linguists and specialists would then say "oh, most X are due to them being cognates." But sometimes X is simply due to loan words ("tv") or other reasons, or coincidence. You're simply asking for the term for "same word in both languages" -- again surprisingly IMO there is no such word.}

Note that today the socially correct answer for SWR, where, the answer is "there's no such word", is "there's no such word."

I'm pretty sure that's the answer in this case (surprisingly!)


Just call it a shared word. English and French for instance have many shared words. Some of them are borrowed, some are cognates, some are false cognates and some are simply onamonapias. But the point you are looking for is simply that they exist in both locations.


Another option might be applying congruent/congruency/congruous to the term. Congruent, according to the FreeDictionary, means coinciding exactly when superimposed and generally relates to math(s)/geometry.

If one were to apply the term to "the same word, that looks alike and mean alike", I wouldn't find it incongruous to apply a term that feels like matching to words.