Cognate Finder

Find cognates of a word across related languages. Cognates are words in different languages that share a common ancestral root.

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How it works

Cognates are words in different languages that descended from the same word in an ancestral language. For example, English "night", German "Nacht", Latin "nox", and Sanskrit "nakta" all derive from the Proto-Indo-European root *nokwts.

• Common ancestry: cognates share a reconstructed root from a proto-language, typically Proto-Indo-European (PIE) for European languages.
• Sound shifts: regular sound changes explain the differences between cognates. For example, Grimm's Law describes how PIE stops became fricatives in Germanic languages (Latin pater vs. English father).
• Language families: results are grouped by branch — Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and more — showing how languages relate to each other.
• False friends: not all similar-looking words are cognates. For instance, English "much" and Spanish "mucho" are not cognate despite their similarity.
• Client-side database: this tool uses a curated dataset of common English words and their known cognates. All processing runs in your browser.

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