Portmanteau

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Formation

Most portmanteaus are formed by one of the following methods:

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• Part of the sounds of both components are mixed in a "creative" way, mostly preserving their order, e.g., slithy in an example above. This method was preferred by Lewis Carroll, but is not much in use otherwise.
• The beginning of one word is prepended to the end of the other, e.g., breakfast + lunch = brunch. Sometimes the letter/sound at the boundary is common to both components, e.g., smoke + fog = smog. This is the most common method of portmanteau forming.
• Both components contain a common sequence of letters or sounds. The portmanteau is composed of the beginning of the first component, the common part and the end of the second component. This is a rare kind of portmanteau. For example, the word Californication, popularized by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, sounds as if it were California + fornication.
• Some languages, like Japanese, encourage the shortening and merging of borrowed foreign words (as in gairaigo), because they are long or difficult to pronounce in the target language. For example, Karaoke, a combination of the Japanese word kara and the clipped form oke of the English loanword "orchestra" (J. ?kesutora ??????), is a portmanteau that has entered the English language. (From the article gairaigo.)

There is no formal definition of portmanteau. However, words made up of two or more other words are usually not considered portmanteaus if they can be described by some other term. Thus, the following are not portmanteaus:

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• Syllabic abbreviations, such as interpol.
• Compound words, such as bagpipe and portmanteau itself.