Portmanteau Definition

pôrt-măntō, pôrtmăn-tō
portmanteaus, portmanteaux
noun
portmanteaus, portmanteaux
A traveling case or bag; esp., a stiff leather suitcase that opens like a book into two compartments.
Webster's New World
A word formed by merging the sounds and meanings of two different words, as chortle, from chuckle and snort.
American Heritage
A word or part of a word that is analyzable as consisting of more than one morpheme without a clear boundary between them, as French du “of the” from de “of” and le “the.”
American Heritage
(Australia, dated) A school bag; often shortened to port or school port.
Wiktionary
adjective
General or generalized.
A portmanteau description; portmanteau terms.
American Heritage
(used only before a noun, of a word, story, etc.) Made by combining two (more) words, stories, etc., in the manner of a linguistic portmanteau.
Wiktionary

Other Word Forms of Portmanteau

Noun

Singular:
portmanteau
Plural:
portmanteaus, portmanteaux

Origin of Portmanteau

  • French portemanteau porte- from porter to carry (from Old French port5) manteau cloak (from Old French mantel) (from Latin mantellum) N., senses 2a and b, in reference to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, in which Humpty Dumpty explains slithy and other made-up words in the poem “Jabberwocky” to Alice as follows: “Slithy” means “lithe and slimy” ... You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word

    From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

  • Coined by Lewis Carroll in Through The Looking Glass to describe the words he coined in Jabberwocky.

    From Wiktionary

  • From French portemanteau, literally porte (“carry") + manteau (“coat")

    From Wiktionary

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portmanteau