Blend word
[2][3][4] English examples include smog, coined by blending smoke and fog,[3][5] and motel, from motor (motorist) and hotel.
On one hand, mainstream blends tend to be formed at a particular historical moment followed by a rapid rise in popularity.
The British lecturer Valerie Adams's 1973 Introduction to Modern English Word-Formation explains that "In words such as motel..., hotel is represented by various shorter substitutes – ‑otel... – which I shall call splinters.
[7][n 1] Thus, at least one of the parts of a blend, strictly speaking, is not a complete morpheme, but instead a mere splinter or leftover word fragment.
[9] Two kinds of coordinate blends are particularly conspicuous: those that combine (near‑) synonyms: and those that combine (near‑) opposites: Blending can also apply to roots rather than words, for instance in Israeli Hebrew: "There are two possible etymological analyses for Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár 'bank clerk, teller'.
Israeli Hebrew כספר kaspár started as a brand name but soon entered the common language.
"[24] Blending may occur with an error in lexical selection, the process by which a speaker uses his semantic knowledge to choose words.
Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the practice of combining words in various ways, comparing it to the then-common type of luggage, which opens into two equal parts: You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.In his introduction to his 1876 poem The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll again uses portmanteau when discussing lexical selection:[28] Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all.
[29] In modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet, a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats, umbrellas and the like.
[35] In 1964, the newly independent African republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar chose the portmanteau word Tanzania as its name.
A more modern blend of ‘Cat’ and ‘Rabbit’ was founded 2023 on X (formerly known as Twitter) to describe a circulating image of a mix between the two, producing the word ‘Cabbit’.
Portmanteau words may be produced by joining proper nouns with common nouns, such as "gerrymandering", which refers to the scheme of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry for politically contrived redistricting; the perimeter of one of the districts thereby created resembled a very curvy salamander in outline.
"Desilu Productions" was a Los Angeles–based company jointly owned by actor couple Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball.
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 states.
By contrast, the public, including the media, use portmanteaus to refer to their favorite pairings as a way to "...giv[e] people an essence of who they are within the same name.
An early known example, Bennifer, referred to film stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.
Other examples include Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) and TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes).
[40] On Wednesday, 28 June 2017, The New York Times crossword included the quip, "How I wish Natalie Portman dated Jacques Cousteau, so I could call them 'Portmanteau'".
[42][43] Chrismukkah is another pop-culture portmanteau neologism popularized by the TV drama The O.C., a merging of the holidays of Christianity's Christmas and Judaism's Hanukkah.
Along with CD, or simply דיסק (disk), Hebrew has the blend תקליטור (taklitór), which consists of תקליט (taklít 'phonograph record') and אור (or 'light').
In the Malaysian national language of Bahasa Melayu, the word jadong was constructed out of three Malay words for evil (jahat), stupid (bodoh) and arrogant (sombong) to be used on the worst kinds of community and religious leaders who mislead naive, submissive and powerless folk under their thrall.
[citation needed] A very common type of portmanteau in Japanese forms one word from the beginnings of two others (that is, from two back-clippings).
A Sino-Japanese example is the name 東大 (Tōdai) for the University of Tokyo, in full 東京大学 (Tōkyō daigaku).
Another example, Pokémon (ポケモン), is a contracted form of the English words pocket (ポケット, poketto) and monsters (モンスター, monsutā).
Some of them include: Although traditionally uncommon in Spanish, portmanteaus are increasingly finding their way into the language, mainly for marketing and commercial purposes.
It is a common occurrence for people with two names to combine them into a single nickname, like Juanca for Juan Carlos, Or Marilú for María de Lourdes.
