12 Surprising Word Pairs That Sound Related—But Aren’t

Usage has a way of shaping and changing language over time. Sometimes this results in pairs of words that may seem unrelated on the surface, but that actually share an etymology. For instance, sarcasm and sarcophagus can both be traced back to the Ancient Greek word sark-, which means “flesh.” But sometimes the opposite is true, with words that sound like they must be related actually having totally different origins. Here are 12 such surprising etymological examples.

1. Fish and Crayfish
2. Emoticon and Emoji
3. Miniature and Minimum
4. Island and Isle
5. Lock and Wedlock
6. Male and Female
7. Man and Human
8. Person and People
9. Pen and Pencil
10. Sound (noun) and Sound (adjective)
11. Bomb and Bombast
12. Face and Shamefaced

Fish and Crayfish

If you’ve ever wondered why crayfish have fish in their name despite clearly being crustaceans, simply look to the word’s etymology. The clawed-creature’s name comes from crevice in Old French, which is likely derived from the Frankish word for “crab,” *krebitja (the asterisk means there’s only indirect evidence of the word existing). The French term passed into English as crevis at the start of the 14th century and then morphed into crayfish during the 16th century due to the end of the word sounding similar to fish.

In Old English, fish could be used to describe any aquatic animal—which explains words like starfish and jellyfish and meant that later adding crayfish to the mix wasn’t out of place. Fish is derived from the Proto-German *fiskaz and can possibly be traced even further back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root word for “fish,” *pisk-.

Emoticon and Emoji

Plenty of people assume that emoji is simply the shortened version of emoticon, but the two words actually come from different languages. That their first three letters match and their meanings are so similar is merely a coincidence.

Emoticons got their start in 1982 at Carnegie Mellon University, with a joke on an online message board about a mercury spill not being taken as a joke. The misunderstanding led to Dr. Scott E. Fahlman proposing a new way to distinguish between jokes and non-jokes online: :-) and :-(, respectively. Within the next decade, these punctuation combinations representing human emotions had been named emoticons—a portmanteau of emotion and icon.

Emojis were born a little later in Japan, with e meaning “picture” and moji meaning “character.” Although they serve the same function as emoticons, they’re actually a different thing; while emoticons can be created with keyboard symbols, emojis are pictograms. The earliest known proto-emojis were released in 1988 by electronics company Sharp, but it was the emoji packs launched by Docomo and Softbank in the late ’90s that are considered the first true emojis.

Miniature and Minimum

Miniature and minimum both start with mini, and both carry connotations of smallness—but they’re derived from entirely different Latin words. While minimum is borrowed wholesale from the Latin word for “smallest,” the origins of miniature are tied to color rather than size. The word can be traced back to minium, which is Latin for “red lead.” This substance was used to make a bright red-orange paint that was often used in medieval manuscripts to outline illustrations—which were called “miniatures” as a result. Thanks to the pictures being little and miniature being so similar to other words for “small,” the word itself eventually came to mean “small” too. The phenomenon where a word’s meaning changes over time is known as semantic shift (or semantic change); one of the better-known examples of such a shift is gay, which hundreds of years ago meant “full of joy, merry,” but now we use it to describe people who are attracted to members of the same sex.

Island and Isle

Island and isle are synonyms and they share their first three letters—so it certainly seem like they would be etymologically linked. But while island can trace its roots back to Proto-Indo-European, isle comes from Latin.

The older of the two words is actually the shorter one, with an s being added to ile towards end of the 1500s. Ile was borrowed from French at the end of the 13th century, having originally come from the Latin word for “island,” insula. As for island, that term probably comes from the PIE root words *akwa-, “water,” + *lendh-, “land.” In Old English, the word became iegland, and in Middle or Early Modern English it morphed into yland. At the end of the 16th century, the spelling finally shifted to island in order to match isle.

Lock and Wedlock

These days, the word wedlock carries connotations of a couple being locked together in matrimony, but the word didn’t originally imply imprisonment (or, to be more romantic, an unbreakable bond à la symbolic love locks). Lock of the “under lock and key” meaning comes from the Proto-Germanic *lukana-, meaning “to close.” But the -lock at the end of wedlock comes from the Old English suffix -lac, meaning “actions or proceedings, practice.” Although a few Old English words used this suffix—e.g. feohtlac, “warfare”—wedlock is the only one that has stood the test of time.

Male and Female

It’s not uncommon to think that the word female is derived from male, but this seemingly perfectly-matched word pair have their origins in different Latin words. Male is derived from masculus, meaning “masculine, male, worthy of a man,” which became masle in Old French, before passing into English as male in the late 1300s. Female, on the other hand, comes from femella, meaning “young female, girl,” which became femelle in Old French and then femele in English in the early 1300s. Although femele predates male, the former word’s spelling was changed to female to match its masculine counterpart.

Man and Human

On a similar note, the word human wasn’t created by simply sticking hu- onto man. Let’s start with the etymology of man, which dates back to the PIE root *man-. In Old English, man/mann was used to refer to human beings of either sex, which is why words such as mankind were deemed all-encompassing. The words wer and wif were used to distinguish between men and women respectively, but by the late 13th century, wer started dropping out of usage, with man coming to denote specifically male and wifman developing into woman.

Human, on the other hand, comes from the Latin word humanus, which again is a gender neutral term for all of humanity. Humanus is thought to come from the Proto-Indo-European word *(dh)ghomon-, used to describe an earthly being, as opposed to a godly one.

Person and People

In modern English, people is the typical plural form of person, but that wasn’t always the case—and although the two words sound similar, they aren’t actually etymologically related.

Person comes from the Latin persona, which was originally used to describe “a mask, a false face,” such as the masks worn by actors when performing plays. Eventually, persona also started being used to refer to a person in general, not just in a play. When person (originally spelled persoun) passed into English around the beginning of the 13th century, the typical pluralization was persons/persouns.

People comes from the Latin word populous, meaning “a people, nation; body of citizens; a multitude, crowd, throng.” The word became peple in English around 1300, having passed through French as pople and peupel.

Since the 18th century, English speakers have been arguing over whether to use people or persons. It was during the latter half of the 20th century that the tide finally turned strongly in favor of people, with persons usually only appearing now in specific legal contexts and set phrases, such as persons of interest.

Pen and Pencil

Although pencil contains pen and both are writing implements, the latter word isn’t actually derived from the former. Between the 6th and mid-19th centuries, pens made from quills—the hollow shaft at the end of a bird’s feather—were the primary writing tool. But the word pen wasn’t used until the end of the 13th century; it passed into English via French from the Latin word penna, “a feather, plume.” Pencil, on the other hand, started being used in English in the middle of the 14th century—it passed through French from Latin, this time from the word for brushes used for writing, penicillus, “painter’s brush, hair-pencil” (but literally meaning “little tail”). It was during the mid-1500s that graphite pencils were invented and the meaning of the word started to switch over.

Sound (noun) and Sound (adjective)

The word sound is commonly used in two different ways: as a noun, e.g. “don’t make a sound,” and as an adjective, e.g. “of sound mind.” But despite being spelled and spoken the same way, these words comes from different places.

The noun sound comes from the Latin sonus, meaning “sound, a noise,” which is derived from the PIE root word *swen-, meaning “to sound.” The adjective sound passed into Old English as gesund from German—which appears in the well-known post-sneeze German word gesundheit (literally healthy + hood)—and can be traced back to the Germanic root word *swen-to-, meaning “healthy, strong.”

Incidentally, the body of water known as a sound has yet another etymology. The aquatic meaning either comes from the Old Norse sund or the Old English sund, both of which denote swimming and a stretch of water and both of which can be traced back to the Germanic *swem-, “to move, stir, swim.”

Bomb and Bombast

If you’ve spent any time on TikTok over the past year or two, you’ve likely heard the phrase bombastic side eye, which boosted the use of the word bombastic. If you’ve since found yourself wondering if bombast is etymologically related to bomb, the answer is no.

The exact origins of bomb are uncertain, with multiple languages sharing similar onomatopoeic words. Greek has bombos, “deep and hollow sound,” Old Norse has bumba, “drum,” and Albanian has bumbullin, “it is thundering.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word passed into English from Spanish and Italian’s bomba and French’s bombe—both of which are terms for an explosive device and probably came from Latin or Greek. Bombast, on the other hand, came to English from French’s bombace, “cotton, cotton wadding,” and has its origin in Latin’s word for “cotton,” bombacem. This makes perfect sense for the definition of the word, with cotton sometimes being used as padding and bombastic meaning “padded out and inflated speech or writing.”

Face and Shamefaced

The word that became shamefaced began in Old English as scamfæst, with fæst (or fast) meaning that something—in this case, shame—was “firmly fixed.” When fast gained the meaning of “rapid, quick” around the 1300s, shamefast started to be misinterpreted as shamefaced. Face was a natural, but accidental, replacement—it sounded similar to fast and shame could sometimes be perceived on a person’s face. That makes shamefaced an eggcorn (a phrasal mistake based on mishearing the correct term) that eventually replaced the original word. A few other words with the -fast suffix managed to endure though, such as steadfast. Face had a simpler journey into English, coming from the Latin facies, meaning “appearance, form, figure” and “visage, countenance.”

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