Portmanteaus We Use in Everyday Life

Monday, June 32 min read

‌‌Ah, the portmanteau — a fancy word for a linguistic phenomenon that you probably use every day in common speech. Portmanteaus are the blending of two words into one to create a new meaning for a singular concept. Pop culture loves to create a portmanteau by blending celebrity couple’s names into one, such as the OG "Brangelina" for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and "Kimye" for Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. If you’ve used these names, you portmanteau-ed and didn’t know it! ‌‌

These portmanteaus can be broken up easily when the couple parts ways. Other portmanteaus are more permanently bonded through such regular use that the blended words make it into the dictionary as their own entries. ‌‌

Animals

"Cockapoo," "labradoodle," "puggle," and "maltipoo" are all portmanteaus of dog breeds that people have created to combine the best features from each breed into a cute new one. People are also creating new types of animals by crossbreeding, producing "beefalo," "ligers," "zorses," and even imagining combinations of mythical creatures like a "Pegacorn" (combining Pegasus and a unicorn). ‌‌

Science

Technical words get smushed together, too, as science moves forward in our understanding of the world. "Hazmat" lets us know what materials are hazardous. A "cyborg" is a combination of cybernetics and an organism (a robot that’s alive?!). "EpiPen," dispensing life-saving medicine for allergies, is a portmanteau of epinephrine and pen (named for the appearance of the device). ‌‌

Locations

Places are also subject to portmanteaus, like the New York City neighborhoods "Tribeca" (Triangle Below Canal Street) and "SoHo" (South of Houston). Mexico and California are combined in various ways from "Calexico" to "Mexicali." And nicknames like "Hotlanta" describe attributes of the locale.

The Internet

The internet is the domain of portmanteaus. "Blog" is a web log, "malware" is malicious software, "emoticons" are emotions expressed in icon form, and "netiquette" is a guide to how people should behave on the internet. Even "internet" itself is a portmanteau, combining "inter" (meaning reciprocal or mutual) and "network." Other daily online portmanteaus we don’t think twice about are the emails we send, or the podcasts, webinars, webcasts, and webisodes that have become a part of our everyday lives. ‌‌

Recent Examples

As society rushes forward almost too quickly, there are gaps in language that portmanteaus fill quite nicely. Recent examples include "cronut," "bromance," "mansplaining," "frenemy," and "tofurkey." As fantabulous as it is to have these portmanteaus, we’re going to need even more ginormous dictionaries to hold all of these words (or maybe we’ll just put them all in a Wiktionary).

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