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Having the same etymology and even having the exact same spelling in two languages does not disqualify a word from being a false friend at all!

Take "gift", for example: "Gift" means "poison" in German, despite both the English and German word deriving from the same Proto-Germanic root, meaning "to give".

> (the word "tariff" in English and "tarif" in German both come from the same Arabic word), they also mean the exact same thing

In this very thread you can find a pretty good counterexample to that proposition, at least in American English.



I said same etymology AND same meaning. They are the same word, not false friends.

US English may have dropped that meaning, but British English still uses it in this way, as do many Europeans when they speak English. It’s a correct translation.


This is an announcement targeted at US customers. One could assume that at least some of these might assume the American English sense of the word.




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