Is there a technical term for words that have different meanings in different languages?
“False friends” term was proposed in 1928 in the book «Les faux amis ou Les pièges du vocabulaire anglais» by J.Derocquigny and M. Koessler. Strictly scientifically they are called interlingual homonyms or interlingual paronyms, where the homonyms are the exact match to what you’re looking for. The main types of the (interlingual) homonyms are: 1) homographs – the words which are written the same way but can be pronounced differently in different languages город (horÓd – kitchen garden in Ukrainian) – город (gÓrat – city in Russian); 2) homophones – the words which are written the differently but sound the same way in different languages, such as “boy” (in English) – бой (battle, fight in Russian), кит (whale in Russian) – кіт (cat in Ukrainian, and the both words you pronounce as “keet” or [k’i:t] – in IPA), These types of homonyms aren’t typical for different languages only, it’s just a case of general phenomenon of homonyny – that’s why this is the real technical term for it. At the
