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A portmanteau (plural portmanteaus or portmanteaux) is a large travelling case made of leather. These cases consist of two halves that are connected with a hinge.
In linguistics, a portmanteau word (sometimes called a blend or frankenword) is a word that is formed by combining two or more words. This meaning of the word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.
An example of a portmanteau is smog, a combination of the words smoke and fog. Baseketball is also a portmanteau of the words baseball and basketball because baseketball is a mixture of the two sports. Carroll used such words to humorous effect in his poems, especially Jabberwocky. James Joyce used portmanteau words extensively in Finnegan's Wake. Many corporate brand names, trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are portmanteaux. For example, WikipediaWikipedia is a multilingual " copyleft" encyclopedia designed to be read and edited by anyone. It is collaboratively edited and maintained by thousands of users via wiki software, and is hosted and supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In addi is a portmanteau made from wikiWiki A Wiki or wiki (pronounced "wicky" or "weekee", see pronunciation section below) is a website (or other hypertext document collection) that allows a user to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows that content to be edited by anybody. and encyclopediaEncyclopaedia Britannica An encyclopedia (alternatively encyclopaedia is a written compendium of human knowledge. The term comes from the Greek words , enkyklios paideia ("in a circle of instruction"). From , circuit shaped from circuit and , meaning inst, and WiktionaryWiktionary is a sister project to Wikipedia whose purpose is to create a free wikiwiki dictionary ( thesaurus, lexicon therein) in every language. Following through with Daniel Alston's idea, it was set up on December 12, 2002. On March 29, 2004 the first, one of Wikipedia's sister projects, is a portmanteau of wikiWiki A Wiki or wiki (pronounced "wicky" or "weekee", see pronunciation section below) is a website (or other hypertext document collection) that allows a user to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows that content to be edited by anybody. and dictionaryFor other uses of "dictionary", see dictionary (disambiguation). A dictionary is a list of words with their definitions, a list of characters with their glyphs, or a list of words with corresponding words in other languages. Many dictionaries also provide.
Portmanteau words are an important feature of fusional languageA fusional language is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to "squish together" many morphemes in a way which can be difficult to segment. The canonical examples of fusional languages are Latin and Germs such as LatinAlternative meanings: See Latin (disambiguation Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages are descended from Latin, and ma.