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Swedish Words Found In English


calticitron

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I have been learning Swedish for more than a year now, and one of the first things I immediately noticed are similar words that can also be found in English. They do not mean the same thing, but the spellings are definitely identical. Here are some examples:

Sex, which means six in Swedish.

Semester, which means vacation in Swedish.

Plan, which means floor level or plane in Swedish.

Salt, which means the same thing, but pronounced differently.

How about you, which Swedish words do you know that are identical with some English words?

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  • 1 month later...

I have been learning Swedish for more than a year now, and one of the first things I immediately noticed are similar words that can also be found in English. They do not mean the same thing, but the spellings are definitely identical. Here are some examples:

Sex, which means six in Swedish.

Semester, which means vacation in Swedish.

Plan, which means floor level or plane in Swedish.

Salt, which means the same thing, but pronounced differently.

How about you, which Swedish words do you know that are identical with some English words?

Good start of a list. Just remember that sex means both 6 and sex (as in English).

There is also a word that English has borrowed from Swedish, which I always laugh at when I hear because it sounds so funny pronounced in English: [en] smorgasbord - [sw] smörgåsbord

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  • 7 months later...

Some of those you listed are examples of cognates. Words are cognates when they share the same etymological origin.

The Swedish "sex" and the English "six" are definitely cognates; they sound similar because they both come from the Proto-Germanic word "sehs" (reconstructed). Plan-plane are probably false cognates, or at least false friends.

There are many, many words in Swedish that are identical to English. For example digital, access, tunnel. They are both Germanic languages, so that is to be expected.

Kilat, ombudsman is a great example of Swedish loanword. Another one is tungsten.

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Hey, good topic!  I know several ones :

adress -- address

avokado -- avocado

basketboll -- basketball

heterosexuell -- heterosexual

lokal -- local

turist -- tourist

Ok, I know they are not spelled the exact way, but pretty close if you ask me! I'd love to learn Swedish, sadly I don't have a good reason to, if I only had more time I'd do it tho, just for fun.

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I am pretty sure that you are going to find several words in other languages as well that sounds similar in English as well. I can tell you about some in Hindi. Words like Glass are pronounced same in both languages.

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