Is there a word for a word that has the same spelling and the same (or almost the same) meaning in two different languages? ("So" exists in both German and English, with the same or a similar meaning.)
Is there a word for a word that has the same spelling in two different languages, but different meanings? ("Do" in Portuguese means "of the.")
Is there a word for a word that looks and/or sounds like the same word, or perhaps almost the same word, in two languages, but in fact has different meanings depending on the language? ("embarazada" in Spanish doesn't mean "embarrassed"; "Taille" in German means "waist"; "gato" in Spanish or Portuguese means "cat," not "gate.")

my guess would be...no, no and no.

I have heard the term "false friends" for words that are the same -or nearly- in two languages. eg En frente (facing) vs in front.
I pr;obably spelled that wrong but I'm too tired to look it up.

These may of may not be cognates. In the case of closely related languages such as English and German the likelihood of their being cognates is relatively high. In the case of languages not that closely related, or with no known relations they are either loan words or pure coincidences. Of the former an example might be the English skosh from the Japanese sukoshi. I used to have a bookmark for a list of words that just happened to look and sound the same with the same or opposite meanings but it seems to have expired.




This category is the one that I would call 'false friends'. I would guess the term is more likely to be used for languages that do have some vocabulary in common than it is for totally coincidental examples as the ones I alluded to above.



These would also be 'false friends'.

Edit: I did discover this list of some coincidences. Not the entire list from my expired bookmark but enough to make the point.

Skosh is an English word? Never heard of it. Use it in a sentence.

Move over just a skosh so I can squeeze in.

Skosh is Japanese?!? I always thought it was yiddish or something!

here's The Straight Dope.

The Straight Dope link was, of course, for any of y'all who didn't accept my link to the AHD.

Coming just across a coincidence it looks like half of our words is the result of some coincidences.
Came across this: Cheyenne: p- poeso- cat; p as in English "spoon" (unaspirated)

Poeso has the exact but for one character spelling as the
Dutch word "poes" (cat), just also like in English "spoon", unaspirated.