What does portmanteau mean?

A portmanteau is a word that is formed by combining two different terms to create a new entity. A portmanteau word is a type of compound word in which some sounds (phonemes) are blended rather than combined whole. For example, the english blend nixonomics has been formed by combining nixon and economics and subtracting the string neco. There are now very many portmanteau words that have become accepted as valid in their own right : smog”, brunch”, infotainment”, dumbfound”, fanzine”, genome”, sitcom” and so forth.

A portmanteau is when two or more words blend together to make a new word. This one, in particular, is used, not surprisingly, as a part of a gin commercial another example is the word charomat, which consists of the words чар (the bulgarian word for charm) and аромат (meaning aroma), made popular by an ad about a coffee brand. However, there are many older words that we may not recognize are indeed portmanteaus.

Compounds displaying sanskritic funny word combinations are extremely commonplace in hindi, but as compounds showing sandhi still consist of multiple morphemes , these are not portmanteaus. Ever afterward, portmanteau passed into common usage to describe blended words like brexit and brunch, oxbridge and texarkana, gerrymander and velcro, infomercial and advertainment, academentia and bloatocratic.

11 in punch in 1896, the word brunch (breakfast + lunch) was introduced as a "Portmanteau word." 18 in 1964, the newly independent african republic of tanganyika and zanzibar chose the portmanteau word tanzania as its name. Thing is, you can't complain about language change without sounding like one of those retired army majors who still writes handwritten letters to the times that start with the words dear sirs” and end with and that's why gay means ‘happy', and not any of this other nonsense”.

Portmanteaus can work for more formal and serious companies too. In both smog and spork, the two words used to form the portmanteau help describe the new word, which is a quality of portmanteaus. In vernacular arabic, contractions are a common phenomenon, in which mostly prepositions are added to other words to create a word with a new meaning.