For instance, take the two words 'fuming' and 'furious'. Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. In his introduction to his 1876 poem The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll again uses portmanteau when discussing lexical selection: You see it's like a portmanteau-there are two meanings packed up into one word. 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: Slithy means 'slimy and lithe' and mimsy means 'miserable and flimsy'.

The word portmanteau was introduced in this sense by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), where Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of unusual words used in ' Jabberwocky'. If it were called a ' stish' or a ' starsh', it would be a portmanteau. For instance, starfish is a compound, not a portmanteau, of star and fish, as it includes both words in full. A portmanteau also differs from a compound, which does not involve the truncation of parts of the stems of the blended words. Ī portmanteau word is similar to a contraction, but contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and not to make don't, whereas a portmanteau is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a single concept. When portmanteaus shorten established compounds, they can be considered clipped compounds. In linguistics, a portmanteau is a single morph that is analyzed as representing two (or more) underlying morphemes. ( May 2020)Ī portmanteau word, or portmanteau ( / p ɔːr t ˈ m æ n t oʊ/ ( listen), / ˌ p ɔːr t m æ n ˈ t oʊ/) is a blend of words in which parts of multiple words are combined into a new word, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel. Wikipedia's multilingual support templates may also be used. This article or section should specify the language of its non-English content, using for phonetic transcriptions, with an appropriate ISO 639 code.

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