portmanteau word
portmanteau word noun: 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.
Noun
portmanteau word (plural portmanteau words)
- 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.
- Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau⸺there are two meanings packed up into one word.[1871 December 27 (indicated as 1872), Lewis Carroll [pseudonym; Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], “Humpty Dumpty”, in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, London: Macmillan and Co....
- 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...1938, Joane Chaffe Miller, Conversion and Fusion in Modern English: A Concise History of the Scholarly Recognition of These Linguistic Processes
- Synonyms:
- portmanteau, blend, blend word, lexical blend, amalgamation, brunch word, frankenword, portmantologism, telescope word
portmanteau word meaning in Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Arabic
portmanteau word in Urdu
- word which combines the meaning of two words
- امیختہ
portmanteau word in Bengali
- word which combines the meaning of two words
- পিন্ডারিশব্দ pinḍariśobdo, পিন্ডারি pinḍari
portmanteau word in Malayalam
- word which combines the meaning of two words
- ചേർത്തുള്ള കൃത്രിമവാക്ക് cēṟttuḷḷa kr̥trimavākk
portmanteau word in Arabic
- word which combines the meaning of two words
- لَفْظٌ مَنْحُوت lafẓun manḥūt, مَزَاج mazāj
More languagesFewer languages
- portmanteau word in Indonesian
- lakuran
- portmanteau word in Persian
- تکواژ مرکب takvâž morakkab, تکواژ چندوجهی takvâž čandvojey, آمیزهسازی âmiz-hesâzi
- portmanteau word in Thai
- คำผสม kam-pà-sǒm, คำสนธิ kam-sǒn-tí, สมาส of compounds of Pali and Sanskrit loanwords
- portmanteau word in Vietnamese
- từ kết hợp
Examples of portmanteau word in a sentence
- Portmanteau Words and Allomorphy - This paper is primarily concerned with the theoretical implications of what have been called portmanteau words (Hockett, 1947)1985, Carlos Piera of Cornell University, “On the Representation of Higher Order Complex Words”, in Selected Papers from the XIIIth...
- 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.2018, James Lambert, “A multitude of ‘lishes’: The nomenclature of hybridity”, in English World-Wide, page 10:
Synonyms of portmanteau word
- portmanteau
- blend
- blend word
- lexical blend
- amalgamation
- brunch word
- frankenword
- portmantologism
- telescope word
Forms of portmanteau word
| plural | portmanteau words |
|---|
Origin of portmanteau word
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”).
Questions about portmanteau word
- What does portmanteau word mean?
- Portmanteau word means 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.
- What is portmanteau word in Urdu?
- Portmanteau word in Urdu is امیختہ. See Portmanteau word meaning in Urdu.
- How do you use portmanteau word in a sentence?
- Portmanteau Words and Allomorphy - This paper is primarily concerned with the theoretical implications of what have been called portmanteau words (Hockett, 1947)
- What part of speech is portmanteau word?
- Portmanteau word is a noun.
- What is the plural of portmanteau word?
- The plural of portmanteau word is portmanteau words.
Words near portmanteau word in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: portmanteau word (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-portmanteau word.wav.
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