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Portmanteau has two meanings. It can refer to a travelling case or to a word formed by combining two or more words.
Travelling case
A portmanteau (plural portmanteaus or portmanteaux) is a large travelling case made of leather. These cases consist of two halves that are connected with a hinge.
Portmanteau words
Common usage
In the more common usage of the term, a portmanteau word (sometimes called a blend or frankenword) is a word that is formed by combining two or more words. This meaning of the word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, in which it is likened to the travelling case. Carroll has Humpty Dumpty say, "Well, slithy means 'lithe and slimy'... You see it's like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word." Carroll used such words to humorous effect in his poems, especially Jabberwocky, which Humpty Dumpty is explaining to Alice.
Another example of a portmanteau is smog, a combination of the words smoke and fog. James Joyce used portmanteau words extensively in Finnegans Wake. Many corporate brand names, trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are portmanteaux. For example, Wikipedia is a portmanteau made from wiki and encyclopedia, and Wiktionary, one of Wikipedia's sister projects, is a portmanteau of wiki and dictionary.
Examples
For a more exhaustive list of examples, see List of portmanteaux.
Portmanteaus in other languages
- Franglais in French: (français + anglais) ("French" + "English"). In French, a portmanteau is called mot-valise.
Almost portmanteaus
These words are not exactly portmanteaus because they do not combine the first part of one word with the last part of another. The term frankenword describes these more aptly.
Technical usage
In linguistics the term portmanteau word is used in a much narrower, yet still not clearly defined sense. Most of the examples given above are usually called blends by linguists. A blend in this sense is a word which creatively combines content words in ways that (a) often rely on similarity of sounds, and (b) don't respect their morphological structure (the way they are formed up from smaller meaningful parts). For example, the word smog is formed by putting together the sm- from smoke and the -og from fog, but neither piece is actually a meaningful subpart of the word it's taken from. Blends are also consciously and deliberately invented by people, in order to use language cleverly and creatively.
Linguists more commonly use the word portmanteau for cases where we have a single word that "ought to be" two separate function words. This is a somewhat informal technical term, so a more precise definition is not really possible. Therefore this use of the word is best illustrated by a textbook example: preposition + article combinations in French. The definite articles in French are the following:
- le (masculine singular)
- la (feminine singular)
- l' (singular, in front of a vowel)
- les (plural)
Using the preposition de "of" in French, it is possible to say de la femme "of the woman" and de l'homme "of the man", but neither *de le Président "of the President" nor *de les personnes "of the persons". The latter two must be said as du Président and des personnes. The boldfaced words du and des are portmanteaus in the narrow sense of linguistic theory; the single word du corresponds to two function words, a preposition and an article.
Portmanteaus in this sense are not consciously or deliberately invented by people. They are a result of regular, slow language change. This is another way in which they differ from blends.
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