a popular but wrong belief about the origin of a word or phrase
Example:
- This explanation may simply be a folk etymology.
a process by which a word is changed, for example because people believe that it is related to another word, even though it is not, or to make a foreign word sound more familiar
Example:
- Folk etymology has created the cheeseburger and the beanburger, but the first hamburgers were in fact named after the city of Hamburg.