Prius (automobile)

2019 Toyota Prius 

The Toyota Prius is a full hybrid electric automobile developed by Toyota and manufactured by the company since 1997.

When Toyota was namining the world's first mass-produced hybrid vehicle, they wanted a name that would connect to it being groundbreaking and the predecessor of the cars of the future. They turned to latin and chose "prius," meaning "first," "original," or "to go before."  It is the root of our modern word "prior."

An odd controversy surrounding the name emerged when people wanted to refer to more than one of the cars. What is the correct plural form?

The two leading contenders were "Prii" and "Priuses." Toyota initially said the plural was "Prius" (like moose or deer). But in February 2011, Toyota USA asked the US public to decide on what the most proper plural form of Prius should be. The choices included Prien, Prii, Prium, Prius, or Priuses. "Prii" was the most popular choice, but it was close - “Prii” received 25% but “Prius” came in a close second with 24%.

Technically, in Latin, the plural of “Prius” is actually “Priora” or “Priores.” (Latin assigns gender to nouns. “Priores” is the feminine plural, while “Priora” would be the neuter plural form.) Priora is a brand name used for a Russian automobile, the Lada Priora in 2007.

And don't be surprised if you still hear people use "Priuses" as the plural in English.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has become the place to go online to start your search for information about - well, just about anything. With its launch in 2001 as an online, editable English-language encyclopedia, it quickly captured a user base and thousands of editors who monitor the articles.

Versions in other languages were quickly developed, but the with more than 6 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. The numbers keep growing, but Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages. It is one of the top 5 websites visited in the world.

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger was the one who coined its name. It is a portmanteau of "wiki" and "pedia" from encyclopedia. But what are the origins of those two words? 

According to Wikipedia:

"The word encyclopedia comes from the Koine Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία,^[8] transliterated enkyklios paideia, meaning "general education" from enkyklios (ἐγκύκλιος), meaning "circular, recurrent, required regularly, general"^[9] and paideia (παιδεία), meaning "education, rearing of a child"; together, the phrase literally translates as "complete instruction" or "complete knowledge".^[10]However, the two separate words were reduced to a single word due to a scribal error^[11] by copyists of a Latin manuscript edition of Quintillian in 1470.^[12] The copyists took this phrase to be a single Greek word, enkyklopaidia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the New Latin word "encyclopaedia", which in turn came into English."

The -pedia part is pretty obvious, but wiki is less obvious. Wikis existed before Wikipedia and the word is still used to describe websites with content that is specifically designed to be edited by its users. "Wiki" was first used by Ward Cunningham to describe software he wrote in 1994 that was meant to speed up the communication process between computer programmers.

Cunningham borrowed the word from the Hawaiian language, where it means "fast," after he heard it in the Honolulu airport when an employee told him to take the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" between terminals.

An erroneous etymology is that wiki is an acronym for "What I Know Is." Some people applied that definition to the word later, making it a backronym.

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.