Portmanteau

A portmanteau is a linguistic blend of words. Parts of multiple words or their phones (sounds) are combined into a new word.

An example is the word "smog" which is a blend of smoke and fog. Motor and hotel are combined to create "motel."

In fancy linguistic talk, a portmanteau is defined as a single morph that represents two or more morphemes.

A portmanteau sounds similar to the grammatical term contraction. But contractions are formed from words that sometimes already appear together in sequence. For example, we say and write "do not" but we also use the contraction "don't."

A portmanteau is also similar to a compound word such as "firetruck" or "starfish." But in a compound word does not truncate parts of the blended words but uses them whole.

English has many portmanteaus. A spork is an eating utensil that is a combination of a spoon and a fork, A skort is an item of clothing that is part skirt, part shorts. The turducken is a food product made by inserting a chicken into a duck, and the duck into a turkey. It sounds like a joke, but it is real and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2010.

Where did the word portmanteau come from?

An illustration by John Tenniel for the poem "Jabberwocky"
by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

The word portmanteau was first used in the sense above by Lewis Carroll in his book Through the Looking-Glass in 1871. In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice that the unusual words in the poem "Jabberwocky" - such as "slithy" means "slimy and lithe" and "mimsy" is a blend of "miserable and flimsy". Humpty Dumpty says "You see it's like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word."

But Carroll did not invent the word. In his time, a portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections. The etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau, from porter, "to carry", and manteau, "cloak" (from Old French mantel, from Latin mantellum). 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.