portmanteau word

Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word portmanteau word. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word portmanteau word, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say portmanteau word in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word portmanteau word you have here. The definition of the word portmanteau word will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofportmanteau word, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.

English

Etymology

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

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
  • 1938, Joane Chaffe Miller, Conversion and Fusion in Modern English: A Concise History of the Scholarly Recognition of These Linguistic Processes‎:
    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, 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, 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.

    • Translations

    See also

    Further reading

    Wikious
    Boobota
    Sagapedia