A
portmanteau ( ) or
portmanteau
word is used broadly to mean a
blend
of two (or more)
words or
morphemes and their meanings into one new word, and
narrowly in
linguistics fields to mean
only a blend of two or more
function
words.
Meaning
"Portmanteau word" is used to describe a
linguistic blend,
namely "a word formed by blending sounds from two or more distinct
words and combining their meanings."
Such a definition of "portmanteau word" overlaps with the
grammatical term
contraction. Linguists avoid using the
latter term in such cases. As an example, the words
do and
not become the contraction
don't, a single word
that represents the meaning of the combined words.
A distinction can be made between the two by noting that
contractions can only be formed with two words that would otherwise
appear in sequence within the sentence, whereas a "Portmanteau
word" is typically formed by combining two or more existing words
that all relate to a singular concept which the new portmanteau is
meant to describe. An example being the well-known portmanteau word
"Spanglish", referring to speaking a mix of both Spanish and
English at the same time. In this case, there is no logical
situation in which the speaker would say "Spanish English" in place
of the portmanteau word in the same way they could say "
do
not" in place of the contraction "
don't", or "
we
are" in place of "
we're".
Origin
The usage of the word "portmanteau" in this sense first appeared in
Lewis Carroll's book
Through the Looking-Glass
(1871), in which
Humpty Dumpty
explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in
Jabberwocky:
- "‘Slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’... You see it's like a
portmanteau—there are two
meanings packed up into one word"
- "‘Mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there's another portmanteau
... for you)".
Carroll uses the word again 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 ... you
will say "frumious."
Charles Dickens used portmanteau to
name many of his characters, most notably "
Scrooge" which results from the combination of
"screw" and "gouge."
According to the
The
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the word
portmanteau comes from French
porter, to carry +
manteau, cloak (from Old French
mantel, from
Latin
mantellum).
Examples
Many
neologisms are examples of blends,
but many blends have become part of the lexicon. In
Punch in 1896, the word
brunch (breakfast + lunch) was introduced as a
"portmanteau word."
In 1964, the newly independent African
republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar
chose the
portmanteau word Tanzania as its
name. A
spork is an eating utensil that
is a combination of a
spoon and
fork.
"
Wikipedia" is an example of a portmanteau
word because it combines the word "
wiki" with
the word "
Encyclopedia."
The song titles on the Norma Jean album Oh God, The aftermath are
all Portmanteau such as "Disconnectie"
"Jeoportmanteau!" is a recurring category on the American
television
quiz show Jeopardy!. The category's name is itself a
portmanteau of "Jeopardy" and "portmanteau". Responses in the
category are portmanteaus constructed by fitting two words
together. For example, the clue "
Brett
Favre or
John Elway plus a
knapsack" yielded the response "What is a
'quarterbackpack'?"
Blaxploitation is a film genre/style,
whose name derives from a portmanteau of "black" and
"exploitation," reflecting its main theme of social problems, along
with the stereotypical depiction of Black people in film.
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: one of the
districts created resembled a
salamander in outline. Two
proper names can also be used in creating a portmanteau word in
reference to the partnership between people, especially in cases
where both persons are well-known, or sometimes to produce
epithets such as "Billary" (referring to former
United States president
Bill Clinton
and
Hillary Rodham Clinton).
In this example of recent American political history, the purpose
for blending is not so much to combine the meanings of the source
words but "to suggest a resemblance of one named person to the
other"; the effect is often derogatory, as linguist
Benjamin Zimmer notes. In contrast, the
public and even the media use portmanteaux to refer to their
favorite pairings as a way to "...giv[e] people an essence of who
they are within the same name." This is particularly seen in cases
of fictional and real-life "
supercouples." An early and well-known example,
Bennifer, referred to film stars (and
former couple)
Ben Affleck and
Jennifer Lopez. Other examples include
Brangelina (
Brad
Pitt and
Angelina Jolie) and
TomKat
(
Tom Cruise and
Katie Holmes). In double-barreled names, the
hyphen is almost pushing one name away from the other. Meshing says
"I am you and you are me," notes one expert.
Portmanteaux (or portmanteaus) can also be created by attaching a
prefix or suffix from one word to give that association to other
words. Subsequent to the
Watergate
scandal, it became popular to attach the suffix "-gate" to
other words to describe contemporary scandals, e.g. "Filegate" for
the
White House FBI
files controversy, and
Spygate, an
incident involving the
2007 New England Patriots.
Likewise, the suffix "
-holism" or "-holic,"
taken from the word "
alcoholism" or
"alcoholic," can be added to a noun, creating a word that describes
an addiction to that noun.
Chocoholic,
for instance, means a person who is "addicted" to chocolate. Also,
the suffix "-athon" is often appended to other words to connote a
similarity to a
marathon (for example,
telethon, phonathon and
walkathon).
Portmanteaus are popular in the naming of indie rock bands in
Vancouver, BC. Japandroids (a combination of Japan and Androids)
and Brasstronaut (a combination of Brass and Astronaut) are two of
the pioneers of this trend in band naming.
Examples in languages other than English
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew abounds with European mechanisms such as blending:
"Along with
kómpaktdisk ‘compact disc’, Hebrew has the
blend
taklitór, which consists of the Hebrew-descent
taklít ‘record’ and
’or ‘light’. Modern Hebrew is
full of portmanteau blends [...] such as (1)
arpíakh
‘smog’, from
arafél ‘fog’ and
píakh ‘soot’; (2)
mídrakhov ‘(pedestrian) mall, promenade’, from
midrakhá ‘footpath’ and
rekhóv ‘street’; (3)
makhazémer ‘musical’, from
makhazé ‘play (n)’ and
zémer ‘singing’; or (4)
bohoráim ‘brunch’, from
bóker ‘morning, breakfast (cf.
arukhát bóker
‘breakfast’)’ and
tsohoráim ‘noon, lunch (cf.
arukhát
tsohoráim ‘lunch’)’."
Icelandic
There is a tradition of
linguistic purism in
Icelandic and
neologisms are
frequently created from pre-existing words.
Tölva
("computer") is a
portmanteau of
tala ("digit;
number") and
völva ("seeress").
Indonesian
Golput is used to refer to voters who abstain from voting,
from
Golongan Putih, "blank party" or "white party."
Japanese
There are many examples of borrowed word blends in Japanese.
"Pasocon", written in katakana (to denote its loan word status)
meaning PC (Personal computer) is not officially an English loan
word. The word does not exist in English. The blend of the English
words 'personal computer' makes the uniquely Japanese word. Also,
Momusu is the shortened version of Morning
and Musume, a popular Japanese girl group."Pokémon" from the
English 'Pocket' and 'Monster' is another example.
Portmanteau morph
In linguistics, the term
blend is used to
refer to general combination of words, and the term "portmanteau"
is reserved for the narrow sense of combining two
function words. Examples of such
combination include French ("à le" →
au; "de le" →
du), German ("in das" →
ins; "in dem" →
im; "zu dem" →
zum; "zu der" →
zur) and Spanish ("a el" →
al; "de el" →
del). This usage has been referred to as
"portmanteau morph."
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