I named one of our dumber work projects 'project seppeku' once. Boss was not amused when someone told him what it meant, but it went undiscovered for longer than I would have imagined, which simultaneosly made me happy and hurt my feelings.

Not quite but I can see why people think so. Both words stem from the same Kanji pair: 腹切. Abdomen cut.

But one is read natively (harakiri) with an informal and colloquial feel to it and the other uses borrowed Chinese readings (seppuku) that makes it sound more formal/ritualistic to be used in formal settings. But they mean the same thing and both refer to the ritual.

A similar example is Japan's own name: 日本. It's usually read as "nihon" but has a special, formal reading of "nippon".

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