Portmanteau

From Freepedia

For other uses, see Portmanteau (disambiguation).

A portmanteau (plural: portmanteaux) is a word that is formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words. It can also be called a frankenword (incidentally, this is another example of a portmanteau). The term used in linguistics is blend (see the section linguistics below).

1 Etymology
2 Formation
3 Linguistics
4 See also
5 External links

Etymology

This word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, in which it is likened to the French word for a type of travelling case or suitcase. Carroll has Humpty Dumpty say, "Well, slithy means lithe and slimy... You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word." Carroll used such words to humorous effect in his poems, especially Jabberwocky, which Humpty Dumpty is explaining to Alice.

"Portmanteau word" was the original phrase used to describe such words (as listed in dictionaries published as late as the early 1990s), but this has since been abbreviated to simply "portmanteau" as the term (and the type of words it describes) gained popularity. "Portmanteau" is rarely used for its original meaning in current English, that type of travelling case having fallen into disuse. In Queensland, Australia, it is shortened to 'Port', and used as slang for a schoolbag.

James Joyce used portmanteau words extensively in Finnegans Wake. Many corporate brand names, trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are portmanteaus. For example, Wikipedia is a portmanteau made from wiki and encyclopedia, and Wiktionary, one of Wikipedia's sister projects, is a portmanteau of wiki and dictionary.

In the 21st Century, tabloid writers often portmanteau-ize the first names of famous couples. Some examples include Bennifer (for both Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, and Affleck and Jennifer Garner) and TomKat (for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes).

Formation

Most portmanteaux are formed by one of the following methods:

Part of the sounds of both components are mixed in a "creative" way, mostly preserving their order, e.g., slithy in an example above. This method was preferred by Lewis Carroll, but is not much in use otherwise.
The beginning of one word is prepended to the end of the other, e.g., breakfast + lunch = brunch. Sometimes the letter/sound at the boundary is common to both components, e.g., smoke + fog = smog. This is the most common method of portmanteau forming.
Both components contain a common sequence of letters or sounds. The portmanteau is composed of the beginning of the first component, the common part and the end of the second component. This is a rare kind of portmanteau. For example, the word Californication, popularized by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, sounds as if it were California + fornication.
Some languages, like Japanese, encourage the shortening and merging of borrowed foreign words (as in gairaigo), because they are long or difficult to pronounce in the target language. For example, karaoke, a combination of the Japanese word kara (meaning empty) and the clipped form oke of the English loanword "orchestra" (J. ōkesutora オーケストラ), is a portmanteau that has entered the English language. (From the article gairaigo.)

There is no formal definition of portmanteau. However, words made up of two or more other words are usually not considered portmanteaux if they can be described by some other term. Thus, the following are not portmanteaux:

Syllabic abbreviations, such as interpol.
Compound words, such as bagpipe and portmanteau itself.

Linguistics

In linguistics, the words that are popularly called portmanteaux are labelled blends. The term portmanteau is used in a different, yet still not clearly defined sense, to refer either to a portmanteau morpheme (a morpheme that fuses two grammatical categories; see Fusional language), or a portmanteau word, a word that fuses two function words. The latter use overlaps a bit with the folk term contraction, but linguists tend to avoid using the latter.