False friends ranked by how often you'll meet them

Every list of false friends opens with the same jokes: Spanish embarazada is "pregnant", not "embarrassed"; Italian preservativo is a condom. They are memorable, and they are not the ones that will trip you up most often. We took 64 false friends — words in French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese that look like an English word and mean something else — and ranked them by how often each is actually said, in film and television dialogue. The top of the list is German "will", which means "wants", said 1,879 times in every million words. Embarazada is number 25.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 7 min read

The full ranking

The rank is by how often each word is said per million words of its own language's subtitles, so the five languages are on one scale. Every form that was counted is in the last column: for verbs we counted the commonest forms that can only be the verb, and left out forms with an innocent second meaning — French reste is also "the rest", Spanish recuerdo also "a memory" — so a verb's figure is a floor.

What the ranking shows

The dangerous false friends are small, ordinary words. The top four — German will and also, Spanish sin, French attendre — are each said more than a thousand times per million words. Ich will is "I want", not "I will" (that is ich werde); German also means "so, well", and "also" is auch; Spanish sin is "without", as in every sin embargo, "however"; French attendre is "to wait", and j'attends is "I'm waiting", not "I'm attending". These do the most damage precisely because they are too short and common to look like vocabulary to learn.

The famous ones are rare. Embarazada comes in at 58 per million. The bookshop words — librería, librairie, libreria, all "a bookshop" rather than "a library" — are among the least common on the list. German also is said hundreds of times as often as Spanish librería.

German has the most common false friends, because German and English share so many short Germanic words that drifted apart in meaning: bald ("soon"), fast ("almost"), Kind ("child"), Art ("a kind, a way"), Chef ("boss"), Gift ("poison"). 19 of the 64 words on the list are said at least a hundred times per million, and German supplies 8 of them — more than any other language.

Italian's are all comparatively rare — the commonest are stampa ("the press") and estate ("summer") — so they are less of a daily hazard and more of a reading one.

The "actually" family is the same trap in four languages. French actuellement, Spanish actualmente, Italian attualmente and Portuguese atualmente all mean "currently, at the moment". None of them is common, but the trap is the same in all four.

How the list was made, and what it leaves out

Each word was chosen by hand, and each meaning checked against the word's entry in its own language on Wiktionary. A word made the list if it looks like an English word — identical (car, pain, sin) or close enough to be read as one (journée, bekommen, magazzino) — and its usual meaning is something else.

Three things to know about the counts:

• English in the subtitles. The English look-alike can turn up in a foreign subtitle as English: a song lyric, a sign, the name Will. We estimated that share for every word from how much obvious English (the, and, of, to) each corpus contains, and refused any word where it could reach a tenth of the count. The largest share left on the list is 6.3%, for Spanish once ("eleven").
• One meaning per word. A few of these words have the English meaning as a second sense: French envie can be "envy" as well as "a wish", and Portuguese propaganda is political propaganda as well as an advert. They are on the list because the false-friend meaning is the everyday one.
• Not the same as the tables already on this site. False friends between Spanish and Italian (burro, "donkey" or "butter") are in can Spanish speakers understand Italian, and those between Spanish and Portuguese among the commonest shared spellings are in Portuguese vs Spanish. None of those words is repeated here; this list is about English.

The opposite case — words that really were borrowed and kept their meaning, more or less — is covered in French words used in English, German words used in English and Spanish words used in English.

Learning them

The ranking suggests an order: learn the top twenty properly, early, as words in their own right, and leave librería and carpeta for when you meet them. Each course's word list puts its words in this same kind of frequency order, so the common false friends come early — German, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese — and the German vocabulary test shows in two minutes how far down that list you already are.

Sources

• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com
• Meanings checked against each word's own-language entry in Wiktionary, 3 October 2026.
• The words, the forms counted and the estimate of English left in the subtitles are in scripts/frequency_extras.py (EN_FALSE_FRIENDS, english_false_friends).