resemble

The everyday use takes its object directly, with no preposition between: the twins resemble each other, and in Margery Allingham's The China Governess (1963) a council block resembled an Atlantic liner. When the point of likeness is named, it follows with in, as in The Merchant of Venice: "We will resemble you in that." Underneath lies Anglo-Norman resembler, built on sembler, "to seem". To resemble something is, at root, to seem like it.

Here someone does the comparing: a writer resembles one thing to another, much as one likens. The preposition to is the mark of this use, as in Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590), where a figure in womanish disguise "he did resemble to his Ladie bright." The use is archaic and now rare. A modern reader would hear the ordinary "look like" meaning, so write liken or compare instead.

Here the likeness is made rather than possessed: the subject works to copy something, as a forger copies a seal or a parrot copies a voice. The verb has since narrowed to simply being like something, so a modern reader meeting a bird that resembles speech hears a puzzling claim of similarity instead of a feat of copying. Outside older texts, use imitate or counterfeit for this meaning.