False friends: journey

The English word “journey” sounds quite like the Italian word “giorno” and it probably comes from the same root…perhaps in the past it referred to a day trip. But in fact “journey” means “viaggio”, in the literal sense of traveling but also in a more figurative sense to talk about a “percorso” of personal development or progress through life. It often has a more poetical or philosophical connotation than the more prosaic word “trip” which we generally use to talk about single episodes of travel, but it’s also used to focus on the act of traveling itself, especially when we refer to the time it takes to go from one place to another. We don’t generally say “a travel” as the word “travel” is uncountable, although strangely it can become plural to talk about a long experience of traveling to different places, for example “In my travels I’ve seen many interesting places”.