Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice that slithy means lithe and slimy, and that mimsy is flimsy and miserable (1871)
Through the Looking-Glass — the passage that named the whole category
General knowledge · Words & language
Portmanteau words
Term coined 1871
Word formation — two words packed into one
Words made by fusing parts of two others, so that the sound and the sense of both are carried in a single form. Lewis Carroll supplied the name in Through the Looking-Glass, where Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice that slithy means lithe and slimy, and that there are two meanings packed up into one word like the two compartments of a travelling case. Linguists prefer to call them blends. Carroll's own coinages chortle and galumph survived; so have smog, brunch, motel and Brexit.
How to spot them
- ▸Humpty Dumpty explaining Jabberwocky to Alice
- ▸Two meanings packed into one word, like a case that opens into two halves
- ▸Linguists call them blends; the popular name comes from a children's book
- ▸Tanzania and Benelux are the political examples
Key facts
Chortle and galumph, both invented for a poem about a boy with a vorpal sword (1871)
Jabberwocky; chortle is chuckle plus snort, galumph gallop plus triumph
Coined in 1905 by Dr Henry Antoine Des Vœux for the mixture hanging over London (1905)
Smog — smoke plus fog
Proposed in 1895 by Guy Beringer as a Sunday meal for people who had been out on Saturday night (1895)
Brunch, in an article called 'Brunch: A Plea'
Motor plus hotel, first used for a roadside inn at San Luis Obispo in 1925 (1925)
The Milestone Mo-Tel, the first building to carry the name
Thackeray invented a composite university for Pendennis in 1849 (1849)
Oxbridge; Camford appears in the same novel and never caught on
Peter Wilding coined the political term in May 2012, four years before the referendum it named (2012)
Brexit; Grexit had been coined a few months earlier for Greece
Tanganyika and Zanzibar united in 1964 and made a new country name out of the two halves (1964)
Tanzania
Key ideas
- A blend is not the same as a compound. A compound joins whole words (bookshop); a blend clips at least one of them, so that the join is invisible and the word sounds like a single unit.
Quick-fire facts
- •Lewis Carroll coined the term in Through the Looking-Glass (1871), the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
- •A portmanteau was a stiff travelling bag hinged to open into two equal compartments; the word is French, porter plus manteau
- •Carroll's frumious is fuming plus furious; he explained several of the coinages in his preface to The Hunting of the Snark
- •Smog was coined in 1905 by Henry Antoine Des Vœux at a meeting of the Public Health Congress
- •Podcast, from iPod and broadcast, was the New Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year in 2005
- •Spork, Chunnel, guesstimate, Eurasia, Bollywood, motel and labradoodle are all blends
- •Benelux is Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg; Tanzania is Tanganyika and Zanzibar
- •Moped comes from Swedish motor and pedaler; napalm from naphthenic and palmitic acids
- •Linguists use the word portmanteau in a second, technical sense for a morph carrying two grammatical meanings at once, as French au carries both à and le
- •Brexit was coined by Peter Wilding in a blog post in May 2012, before David Cameron had promised a referendum
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Sources
- David Crystal — The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language
- Lewis Carroll, edited by Martin Gardner — The Annotated Alice