My favorite example of similar words with seemingly-unrelated meanings is "capitulate" (surrender) and "recapitulate" (repeat or summarize). Turns out that the

My favorite example of similar words with seemingly-unrelated meanings is "capitulate" (surrender) and "recapitulate" (repeat or summarize). Turns out that they both derive from "caput" (head) in its sense of chapter or heading, due to the formal process of surrendering in war, which involved drafting a document explicating the terms of surrender which was divided into chapters.