Portmanteau

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Portmanteau (disambiguation).
A portmanteau (p??rt'mnto? (About this sound listen), ?p??rtmn'to?[a]; plural
portmanteaus or portmanteaux -'to?z[b]) or portmanteau word is a linguistic blend
of words,[1] in which parts of multiple words or their phones (sounds) are combined
into a new word,[1][2][3] as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog,[2][4] or
motel, from motor and hotel.[5] In linguistics, a portmanteau is defined as a
single morph that represents two or more morphemes.[6][7][8][9]

The definition overlaps with the grammatical term contraction, but contractions are
formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and
not to make don't, whereas a portmanteau word is formed by combining two or more
existing words that all relate to a singular concept which the portmanteau
describes. A portmanteau also differs from a compound, which does not involve the
truncation of parts of the stems of the blended words. For instance, starfish is a
compound, not a portmanteau, of star and fish; whereas a hypothetical portmanteau
of star and fish might be stish.

Contents [hide]
1 Origin
2 Examples in English
2.1 Standard English
2.1.1 Formal
2.1.2 Informal
2.1.3 Business
2.2 Non-standard English
2.2.1 Name-meshing
3 Other languages
3.1 Arabic
3.2 Bulgarian
3.3 Chinese
3.4 Filipino
3.5 French
3.6 Galician
3.7 German
3.8 Modern Hebrew
3.9 Hindi
3.10 Hungarian
3.11 Icelandic
3.12 Indonesian
3.13 Japanese
3.14 Spanish
3.15 Tibetan
4 Wordmorph (linguistics)
5 See also
6 Notes
7 References
8 External links
Origin[edit]
The word portmanteau was first used in this sense by Lewis Carroll in the book
Through the Looking-Glass (1871),[10] in which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the
coinage of the unusual words in Jabberwocky,[11] where slithy means slimy and lithe
and mimsy is miserable and flimsy. Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the practice of
combining words in various ways

You see it's like a portmanteauthere are two meanings packed up into one word.

In his introduction to The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll uses portmanteau when
discussing lexical selection

Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau,
seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words fuming
and furious. Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled
which you will say first if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced
mind, you will say frumious.[11]

In then-contemporary English, a portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two

equal sections. The etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau, from porter,
to carry, and manteau, cloak (from Old French mantel, from Latin mantellum).[12] In
modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet, a coat-tree or similar article
of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats, umbrellas and the like.[13][14][15] It
has also been used, especially in Europe, as a formal description for coat racks
from the French words porter (to carry) and manteau (cloak).

An occasional synonym for portmanteau word is frankenword, an autological word

exemplifying the phenomenon it describes, blending Frankenstein and word.[16]

Examples in English[edit]
Main article List of portmanteaus
Standard English[edit]
Formal[edit]

The original Gerrymander pictured in an 1812 cartoon. The word is a portmanteau of

Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry's name with salamander.
Many neologisms are examples of blends, but many blends have become part of the
lexicon.[11] In Punch in 1896, the word brunch (breakfast + lunch) was introduced
as a portmanteau word.[17] In 1964, the newly independent African republic of
Tanganyika and Zanzibar chose the portmanteau word Tanzania as its name. Similarly
Eurasia is a portmanteau of Europe and Asia.

Some city names are portmanteaus of the border regions they straddle Texarkana
spreads across the Texas-Arkansas border, while Calexico and Mexicali are
respectively the American and Mexican sides of a single conurbation. A scientific
example is a liger, which is a cross between a male lion and a female tiger (a
tigon or tiglon is a similar cross in which the male is a tiger).

Many company or brand names are portmanteaus, including Microsoft, a portmanteau of

microcomputer and software; the cheese Cambozola combines a similar rind to
Camembert with the same mold used to make Gorgonzola; passenger rail company
Amtrak, a portmanteau of America and track; Velcro, a portmanteau of the French
Velours (velvet) and Crochet (hook); Verizon, a portmanteau of veritas (Latin for
truth) and horizon; and ComEd (a Chicago-area electric utility company), a
portmanteau of Commonwealth and Edison (Thomas Edison).

Jeoportmanteau! is a recurring category on the American television quiz show

Jeopardy!. The category's name is itself a portmanteau of the words Jeopardy and
portmanteau. Responses in the category are portmanteaus constructed by fitting two
words together.

Informal[edit]
Portmanteau words may be produced by joining together proper nouns with common
nouns, such as gerrymandering, which refers to the scheme of Massachusetts Governor
Elbridge Gerry for politically contrived redistricting; the perimeter of one of the
districts thereby created resembled a very curvy salamander in outline. The term
gerrymander has itself contributed to portmanteau terms bjelkemander and
playmander.
Oxbridge is a common portmanteau for the UK's two oldest universities, those of
Oxford and Cambridge.

A spork
Many portmanteau words receive some use but do not appear in all dictionaries. For
example, a spork is an eating utensil that is a combination of a spoon and a fork,
and a skort is an item of clothing that is part skirt, part shorts. On the other
hand, turducken, a dish made by inserting a chicken into a duck, and the duck into
a turkey, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2010.

Similarly, the word refudiate was first used by Sarah Palin when she misspoke,
conflating the words refute and repudiate. Though initially a gaffe, the word was
recognized as the New Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2010.[18]