{"id":24603,"date":"2019-09-12T23:11:13","date_gmt":"2019-09-12T15:11:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hongkiat.com\/blog\/?p=24603"},"modified":"2019-09-12T21:53:38","modified_gmt":"2019-09-12T13:53:38","slug":"portmanteaus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hongkiat.com\/blog\/portmanteaus\/","title":{"rendered":"50 Words You Probably Didn’t Know Were Portmanteaus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don\u2019t know what a portmanteau is? If you have heard of the words brunch<\/em>, blog<\/em> and pixel<\/em>, then yes, you know portmanteaus (just not what they are). Portmanteaus, in the literary sense is a word that is created by merging two different words<\/strong> (and their meanings) to form a new word e.g. breakfast<\/em> and lunch<\/em> to make brunch<\/em>, web<\/em> and log<\/em> to make (weblog<\/em> which eventually became just) blog<\/em>, and picture<\/em> and element<\/em> to make pixel<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You can find it when a new celebrity couple forms (brangelina<\/em>, bennifer<\/em>, merkozy<\/em>) or when biologists and movie-makers have given up on names for interspecies lovechildren<\/a> \u2013 real (liger<\/em>, zonkey<\/em>) or fictional (sharktopus<\/em>). In this post, we\u2019re going to dive into the world of portmanteaus (that last bit is pronounced \u2013toe<\/em>, if you\u2019re wondering).<\/p>\n

Origins and Meaning<\/h2>\n

So a portmanteau is formed from two french words, \u201cporter\u201d which means carry<\/em><\/strong> and \u201cmanteau\u201d which means mantle<\/em><\/strong> \u2013 a mantle is a cloak, the kind Anna wore in Frozen<\/em>, or if you are a more traditionalist fairy tale lover, what Red Riding Hood wore en route to grandma\u2019s house (to be honest, I\u2019ve always thought it was a cape but I digress). A manteau is more of a clothes valet, which is exactly what it sounds like<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Put them together and you use portmanteau<\/em> to refer to travelling bags or suitcases (because they carry your cloaks around?) only these bags are old-fashioned, made from leather and can open into compartments. Here are some examples<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is from this definition that we get portmanteaus as a literary device (something you use in writing). For that you can thank Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland<\/em>. He made up quite a few words in Jabberwocky<\/a>, a poem he wrote, and one we might have a hard time understanding. Here\u2019s a snippet.<\/p>\n

\"jabberwocky\"<\/figure>\n

In one of Carrolls books, Through the Looking Glass<\/em>, Humpty Dumpty explained away to Alice the weird words inside the poem as portmanteaus<\/a>. To be more precise:<\/p>\n

\u201cit\u2019s like a portmanteau<\/strong> \u2013 there are two meanings packed up into one word<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fun fact: portmanteau itself is a portmanteau. Second fun fact: movies can be portmanteaus<\/a> too, for instance Pulp Fiction, Crash, Cloud Atlas \u2013 it\u2019s basically a movie that is made up of several short stories linked together one way or another.<\/p>\n

Portmanteaus Today<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s pretty common to see portmanteaus used in the tech industry, notably on tech sites. Here are just a few off the top of my head:<\/p>\n