Sunday, November 25, 2018

Word of the Week 11/25/18: Portmanteau

From Dictionary.com:
A case or bag to carry clothing in while traveling, especially a leather trunk or suitcase that opens into two halves.1580s, "traveling case or bag for clothes and other necessaries," from Middle French portemanteau "traveling bag," originally "court official who carried a prince's mantle" (1540s), from porte, imperative of porter "to carry" + manteau "cloak".Portmanteau word "word blending the sound of two different words" (1882), coined by "Lewis Carroll" (Charles L. Dodgson, 1832-1898) for the sort of words he invented for "Jabberwocky," on notion of "two meanings packed up into one word."

From Wiktionary:
First used by Lewis Carroll in 1871, based on the concept of two words packed together, like a portmanteau (“a travelling case having two halves joined by a hinge”).A word which combines the meaning of two words (or, rarely, more than two words), formed by combining the words, usually, but not always, by adjoining the first part of one word and the last part of the other, the adjoining parts often having a common vowel; for example, smog, formed from smoke and fog.

From Vocabulary.com:
You might remember portmanteau from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, where Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the portmanteau word, in which "two meanings are packed up into one word." So, according to Humpty Dumpty, slithy means "lithe and slimy," and mimsy is "flimsy and miserable."


From Wikipedia:
A portmanteau is a linguistic blend of words, in which parts of multiple words or their phones (sounds) are combined into a new word.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. 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.In 1964, the newly independent African republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar chose the portmanteau word Tanzania as its name.Many company or brand names are portmanteaus, including Microsoft, a portmanteau of microcomputer and software; passenger rail company "Amtrak", a portmanteau of "America" and "track"; "Velcro", a portmanteau of the French "Velours" (velvet) and "Crochet" (hook).


Examples from Oxford Dictionaries, Wikipedia, Vappingo.com:

affluenza - affluence and influenza
animatronic - animate and electronics
bash - bang and smash
bionic - biology and electronic
brunch - breakfast and lunch
carjack - car and hijack
chortle - chuckle and snort
cineplex - cinema and complex
cosplay - costume and play
cyborg - cybernetic and organism
electrocution - electricity and execution
emoticon - emotion and icon
endorphin - endogenous and morphine
fanzine - fan and magazine
flare - flame and glare
glitz - glamour and Ritz
hassle - haggle and tussle
infomercial - information and commercial
internet - international and network
interrobang - interrogative and bang
jackalope - jackrabbit and antelope
malware - malicious and software
mansplaining - manand explaining
McMansion - McDonalds and mansion
meld - melt and weld
mockumentary - mock and documentary
moped - motor and pedal
motel - motor and hotel
motorcade - motor and cavalcade
murse - man and purse
rockabilly - rock’n’roll and hill-billy
scuzz - scum and fuzz
shopaholic - shop and alcoholic
smog - smoke and fog
Spanglish - Spanish and English
spork - spoon and fork
telethon - television and marathon
televangelist - television and evangelist
three-peat - three and repeat
workaholic - work and alcoholic

Triples:
testosterone - testis, sterol, and ketone
turducken - turkey, duck and chicken

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