"A portmanteau (plural: portmanteaus or portmanteaux) or portmanteau word is a blend of two (or more) words or morphemes into one new word. A portmanteau word typically combines both sounds and meanings, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog.
Although portmanteau is a borrowing from French (modern spelling: portemanteau), it is not used in French in this sense. It literally means "coat carrier" and in Modern French refers to a coat stand or coat hook, but in the past it could also mean "suitcase". It was in this sense that it first came into English, and the metaphorical use for a linguistic phenomenon (putting one word inside another, as into a case) is an English coinage."
Examples of "portmanteau" in this sense appeared in Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), in which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in Jabberwocky, where "slithy" means "lithe and slimy" and "mimsy" is "flimsy and miserable". Humpty Dumpty explains the practice of combining words in various ways by telling Alice,
'You see it's like a portmanteau -- there are two meanings packed up into one word.'
P and I coined a few portmanteaus ourself while traveling the end of last year:
acrazing (crazy + amazing)
travelchism (travel + masochism)
And here's a few of my favorite better-known portmanteaux:
brunch (one of my favorite meal times)
turducken (ridiculous meat nesting)
Billery (political power-blend)
Brangelina (hate the drama of it and all the press it gets, but think it's funny to just lump them into one concept)
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