portmanteau word

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English[edit]

Etymology[edit]

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”).

Noun[edit]

Examples

portmanteau word (plural portmanteau words)

  1. (linguistics) 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.
    Synonyms: amalgamation, blend, (dated) brunch word, frankenword, portmanteau, portmantologism, telescope word
    • [1871 December 27 (indicated as 1872), Lewis Carroll [pseudonym; Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], “Humpty Dumpty”, in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, London: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC, pages 126–127:
      Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau⸺there are two meanings packed up into one word.]
    • 1938, Joane Chaffe Miller, Conversion and Fusion in Modern English: A Concise History of the Scholarly Recognition of These Linguistic Processes‎[1]:
      He found the blend "tomax" in "a collection of gratulatory verses presented by the President and Fellows of Harvard College 1 to the new King, George III," dated 1761. A note by the owner of the volume explains the word as a combination of tomahawk and axe: "It is a portmanteau word, which must have been as clear to the average reader in England of 1761 — as clear to George III himself - as brillig and slithy would have been to us, had not Humpty Dumpty kindly explained them."
    • 1985, Carlos Piera of Cornell University, “On the Representation of Higher Order Complex Words”, in Selected Papers from the XIIIth Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, Chapel Hill, N.C., 24-26 March 1983‎[2], page 287:
      1. Portmanteau Words and Allomorphy - This paper is primarily concerned with the theoretical implications of what have been called portmanteau words (Hockett, 1947)
    • 2018, James Lambert, “A multitude of ‘lishes’: The nomenclature of hybridity”, in English World-Wide‎[3], page 10:
      One reason for the popularity of portmanteau words in naming language hybrids may be the fact that the names themselves embody a type of hybridity.

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