Paronymic attraction

In etymology, including onomastics, paronymic attraction is the distorting effect exerted on a word by one of its paronyms (that is, a quasi-homonym). Paronymic attraction is the origin of many names. The attraction can even be cross-linguistic: the resemblance between the Romanian language word locaţie (a space for which a rent should be paid) and the English word "location" helped a semantic shift of the former word to include the latter sense.[1]

A common phenomenon, paronymic attraction is usually expressed through the replacement of a word whose meaning is not understood by a term designating a name (common or proper) or a common concept. For example, in the French language, interpoler (to add something in the middle of writing) and interpeller (to question someone formally) are sometimes substituted for each other because of their similar sound, despite their differences in meaning.[2]