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A portmanteau (plural: portmanteaus or portmanteaux)(IPA pronunciation: ) is a word or morpheme that fuses two or more words or parts of words to give a combined meaning. more...
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A folk usage of portmanteau refers to a word that is formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words (e.g. "animatronics" from "animation" and "electronics"). Typically, portmanteau words are neologisms. One of the most well-known examples is cyborg, a term which is commonly used to refer to a cybernetic organism.
Etymology
This usage of the word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from Jabberwocky, saying, "Well, slithy means lithe and slimy ... You see it's like a portmanteau— there are two meanings packed up into one word." Carroll often used such words to a humorous effect in his work.
"Portmanteau", from Middle French "porter" (to carry) and "manteau" (a coat or cover), formerly referred to a large travelling bag or suitcase with two compartments, hence the linguistic idea of fusing two words and their meanings into one. "Portmanteau" is rarely used to refer to a suitcase in English any more, since that type of a suitcase has fallen into disuse. In French, the word has the different meaning of "coat hanger," and sometimes "coat rack," and is spelled "porte-manteau." The French word for "Portmanteau" is "mot valise", which translates literally as "suitcase word".
"Portmanteau word" was the original phrase used to describe such words (as listed in dictionaries published as late as the early 1990s), but this has since been abbreviated to simply "portmanteau" as the term (and the type of words it describes) gained popularity.
General summary
A portmanteau morpheme is a morpheme that fuses two grammatical categories (see Fusional language). The classical example of such a morpheme in English is the verbal suffix -s. This particular suffix carries (i.e., ports) at least four distinct inflectional meanings and imparts each of these onto the verb's meaning:
Singular (number);
Third-person (perspective);
Present (tense);
Indicative (mood);
Spanish verb suffixes are also exceptionally fusional, with very many portmanteaux in the Spanish inflectional system.
A portmanteau word is a word that fuses two function words. This use overlaps a bit with the folk term contraction, but linguists tend to avoid using the latter. Example: In French, à + les becomes aux (IPA: ), a single indivisible word that contains both meanings.
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