Paronymic attraction
Paronymic attraction is popular or folk etymology arising from similarity of appearance or sound.
It is the distorting effect exerted on a word by one of its paronyms according to etymology and onomastics. Paronymic attraction is the origin of many names. There are even cross-linguistic instances of such attractions. For example, the resemblance between the Romanian word locaţie and the English word location helped a semantic shift of the former word to include the latter sense.
Paronymic attraction is commonly expressed through the replacement of a word whose meaning is not understood. For example, in the French language, interpoler and interpeller are sometimes substituted for each other because of their similar sound, despite their differences in meaning.