Skip to content

Italian for English speakers

English isn't a Romance language, but it borrowed thousands of words from French and Latin: of the 2,264 everyday words in Cognata, 1,106 have a cognate between English and Italian. Start from those, and keep the false friends in sight.

Sets your pairing to English → Italian and opens the cognates.
share a source
49%
distant cognates
4%
to learn fresh
47%

2,264 words compared

Words you already know

Everyday words whose English and Italian forms come from the same source.

False friends to watch

  • camera (Italian) means “room (camera da letto: bedroom)” · camera (English) means “device for taking photos”

    Latin CAMERA 'vaulted room' (from Greek). English camera is short for camera obscura 'dark chamber', the room-sized ancestor of the device; Italian kept the room.

  • parenti (Italian) means “relatives” · parents (English) means “mother and father”

    Latin PARENTĒS meant 'parents'; Italian parenti and Spanish parientes widened it to all kin. French parents covers both senses.

  • fattoria (Italian) means “farm” · factory (English) means “manufacturing plant”

    Both from Latin FACTOR 'maker, doer'. An Italian fattore was a farm steward, so his fattoria the farm; an English factor was a trading agent, and his factory first a trading post.

  • morbido (Italian) means “soft” · morbid (English) means “gruesome, preoccupied with death”

    Both from Latin MORBIDUS 'diseased'. Italian softened it through 'delicate, tender (like flesh)' to plain 'soft'; English kept the disease.

  • estate (Italian) means “summer” · estate (English) means “property, land”

    Pure coincidence: Italian estate is Latin AESTĀTEM 'summer'; English estate is Old French estat, from STATUM 'condition'.

Words to learn fresh

Common words where Italian went its own way.