We're not interested in words with a similar etymological root or loan words.
We're looking for the weird words - the ones that are the same purely through coincidence.
Not a dictionary. Not a genealogy of language.
We collect coincidences: words that look alike without borrowing, shared roots, or historical handshakes.
This website is an amalgamation of effort, curiosity, admiration, and work.
The linguistic data comes from kaikki.org (kaikki — [Finnish] all, everything, everyone), a digital archive and data mining group who have extracted millions of words, and the information about those words, from Wiktionary.
Wiktionary is a free, collaborative, multilingual online dictionary which aims to describe all words of all languages using definitions and descriptions in English. Wiktionary is written by volunteer editors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
We aim to filter for words with divergent meanings to exclude instances where the match was due to a shared etymological root or a loan word — an imperfect process that we continue to refine. We recognize that English is the dominant language of Wiktionary, and there are many words and languages out there that we are missing, particularly those written in scripts other than the Latin alphabet.
Many thanks to our fantastic professors, Dhrumil Mehta and Aarushi Sahejpal, and amazing TA Asa Royal. This project could not have happened without their thoughtful instruction and support.
Explore coincidences. Make unexpected connections. Encounter the absurd. Find something funny. Write poetry.