realizar
ES [realiˈθaɾ] · Spanish for “to carry out” · collides with English realize, as Czech realizovat does
My bank’s Spanish app offers to realizar una transferencia, and for a while I liked the idea of an institution that would simply become aware of my money moving. Czech does the same to me at work, where nothing is ever just finished. Projects are realizovány, which sounds enormous and means somebody built the thing.
Realizar is to carry out. Two of the languages I use every day agree about that, and the one I happen to think in does not.
Spanish and Czech are the sensible ones here. Both built the verb on real, so realizar and realizovat mean to make a thing real. You carry out a plan, you perform a test, you realise a project in the old literal sense of bringing it into the world. English began in the same place and has not entirely left it, which is why you can still realise your potential. Then in the eighteenth century English grew a second sense - making something real to the mind rather than to the world - and that one quietly ate the first. An English speaker now realises things by understanding them and has to reach for carry out to say anything else.