Portmanteau

A portmanteau (/pɔrtˈmæntoʊ/), plural portmanteaux, is a word or morpheme that fuses two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded meaning. A folk usage of portmanteau refers to a word formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words (e.g., spork from spoon and fork, animatronics from animated and electronics, guesstimate from guess and estimate, wikipedia from wiki and encyclopedia, or ginormous from gigantic and enormous). Typically, portmanteaux are nonce words or neologisms. Portmanteaux are commonly used in science fiction for a wide variety of technical words, such as cyborg from cybernetic and organism.

Etymology and usage

This usage of the word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from Jabberwocky, saying, “Well, slithy means lithe and slimy ... You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.” Carroll often used such words to convey humorous effect in his work.

Portemanteau, from Middle French porte (carry) and manteau (a coat or cover), originally referred to a large travelling bag or suitcase with two compartments, hence the linguistic idea of fusing two words and their meanings into one. Portemanteau is rarely used to refer to a suitcase in English any more, since that type of a suitcase has fallen into disuse. (Note - amongst older Australians the diminutive term "port" is sometimes used to describe a carry-item containing personal belongings.) In French, the word has the different meaning of coat hanger, and sometimes coat rack, and is spelled porte-manteau.

Portmanteau word was the original phrase used to describe such words (as listed in dictionaries published as late as the early 2000s), but this is now usually abbreviated to simply portmanteau. The term blend is commonly used in modern linguistic usage for words such as motel, smog and brunch.

General summary

Rapicasso is a visual example that illustrates portmanteau by combining break dancing, rap and Picasso's The Three Dancers. John Fekner © 1983 Spray Paint on Industrial Silkscreen.

A portmanteau morpheme is a morpheme which fuses two or more grammatical categories (see fusional language). The classical example of such a morpheme in English is the verbal suffix -s. This particular suffix carries (i.e., ports) at least four distinct inflectional meanings and imparts each of these onto the verb's meaning:

• Singular (number)
• Third-person (person)
• Present (tense)
• Indicative (mood)

Spanish verb suffixes are also fusional with very many portmanteaux in the Spanish inflectional system.

A portmanteau word is a word which fuses two function words. This use overlaps a bit with the folk term contraction, but linguists tend to avoid using the latter. Example: In French, à + les becomes aux (IPA: [o]), a single indivisible word which contains both meanings.

Outside the formal study of linguistics, the term portmanteau is used in a different, yet still not clearly defined sense, to refer to a blending of the parts of two or more words (generally the first part of one word and the ending of a second word) to combine their meanings into a single neologism. One of the more famous portmanteaux in postmodern Continental philosophy is différance. Coined by Jacques Derrida, différance is a word combining the terms to differ and to defer (in the Saussurean sense) to describe the fractured and eternally-signifying character of language (see deconstruction).

Examples

• Bionic, from biological and electronic
• Breathalyzer, from breath analyzer
• Brunch, from breakfast and lunch
• Camcorder, from camera and recorder
• Chunnel, from Channel Tunnel
• Emoticon, from emotion icon
• Infomercial, from informational commercial
• Interpol, from International Police
• Interzone, from international zone
• Simulcast, from simultaneous broadcast
• Sitcom, from situational comedy
• Spork, from spoon and fork

See also

• Syllabic abbreviations
• Compound words
• Clipping (morphology)
• Blend (linguistics)
• Amalgamation (names)
• Contraction (grammar)
• Morphology (linguistics)
• Border towns in the United States with portmanteau names
• List of portmanteaux
• Verbal Behavior

External links

• Portmanteau as a figure of speech.
• List of Acronyms and Portmanteaux
• Wordie.org page
• spork.org (dedicated to a portmanteau word)