or adj. Any one of two or more words in genetically related languages which are descended from a single common ancestor in the common ancestral language. For example, English foot and German Fuss ‘foot’ are cognate, both being derived from...

In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common origin. They may occur within a language, such as shirt and skirt as two English words descended from the Proto-Indo-European word *sker-, meaning "to cut". They may also occur across languages, e.g....