It was absolutely a thing, and the best example is that the old Indo-European word for bear is eradicated in Northern European languages, because it was thought that the true name of the animal would summon it, and bears were not something you wanted around.

So instead of using the taboo name, everyone used the noa name for the animal, a euphemism, which is why "bear" actually means "the brown one". In Slavic languages, a common euphemism the "the honey eater" - "medved".

The original word exists in Southern European languages, "ours" in French, "orso" in Italian, coming from "ursus" in Latin, and "arctos" in Greek.

Another example is the word for wolf, which exists in that form in most European languages (wolf, ulv, vlk, lobo), but in Swedish the common word is "varg", which is a noa-name, a euphemism, meaning cattle-killer. "ulv" still exists in Swedish, but is seen as an archaic fairy-tale word