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This is like how German has the words "Bürste" and "Pinsel". Bürste is a brush that one might use for scrubbing, while Pinsel is a paintbrush, usually with a p

• vidarh 5y ago
  In that case it's an example of a Germanic vs. Romance/Latin origin, which is quite common in English when you have two related but very different words (e.g. beef via French, while cow is Germanic). The interesting thing here is that the other Germanic languages also have the split, which isn't quite as common, but not unusual. So you get English brush, German Bürste and Norwegian børste from proto-Germanic origin, and German Pinsel, Norwegian/Swedish pensel and English pencil from Latin via Old French pincel/pincil. Obviously the meaning diverged, but it makes sense when you consider that a fine paintbrush was also a writing instrument, and so when a lead/graphite stick became common English ended up with a meaning for pencil referencing that writing instrument while e.g. German and Scandinavian (and possibly other Germanic languages but haven't checked) instead picked some variant of "lead pen" (e.g. German Bleistift, Norwegian blyant) for pencil while retaining the "paintbrush" meaning for the latin-derived word.