Oceanography

The fifth entry is a ressurgência, and it is the one word on this page an English reader will get wrong while feeling entirely safe. What it names is the rise of cold, nutrient-rich water along a coast when the wind pushes the surface layer away, and the English term for it is « upwelling » — a plain compound with nothing learned about it. Beside that sits an English word that looks like the perfect match, « resurgence », and it is not one. A resurgence in English is a comeback: a resurgence of interest, a resurgence of the disease, a resurgence of an argument everyone thought settled. It is used of things that faded and returned, it is almost always abstract, and no oceanographer writing in English would put it in a report. So the pairing has to be crossed over: a ressurgência is « upwelling », while « a resurgence » is um ressurgimento or simply um regresso. The trap is a quiet one, because both words are built on the Latin resurgere, to rise again, and both really do describe something coming back up. Only one of them is ever wet.