portmanteau

adjective

: combining more than one element, use, or quality

As a book, it is essentially a portmanteau collection of aspects of martial life that caught Holmes's eye during his career.

—James Owen

The building of the embankment was a portmanteau scheme, defending valuable building land against high tides, providing space for sewers below, and for carriages and pedestrians above.

—Hermione Hobhouse

… the portmanteau character "Corporal Jones", an unlikely composite …

—Dale Clarke

The new work from Wes Anderson, "The French Dispatch," is a portmanteau film. That is to say, it contains a number of narratives—in this instance, four—that are neatly packed together, as if inside a suitcase.

—Anthony Lane

see also portmanteau word sense 1

Did you know?

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain words from the nonsense poem "Jabberwocky" and is told that slithy is "like a portmanteau-there are two meanings packed up into one word." Although slithy hasn't caught on (it's made up of slimy and lithe, according to Humpty Dumpty), another portmanteau invented by Carroll has in fact found a place in the language: chortle (supposedly from chuckle and snort). English includes other portmanteaus, too, such as brunch (breakfast and lunch) and dramedy (drama and comedy). Following Carroll's lead, English speakers have come to call these fairly common words by the not-so-common name for a type of traveling bag with two compartments. The technical (and simpler) term for such words is blend.

Examples of portmanteau in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

So many of the words created our dozens of neologism contests over the decades are portmanteau words, the combination of two words. —Washington Post, 18 July 2019

Word History

First Known Use

1909, in the meaning defined above

Phrases Containing portmanteau

• portmanteau word

Rhymes for portmanteau

• adagio
• altiplano
• arapaho
• arapahoe
• fortissimo
• manifesto
• minangkabau
• oregano
• ostinato
• pistachio
• politico
• portfolio

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Kids Definition

portmanteau

noun

port·​man·​teau

pōrt-ˈman-tō, 

pȯrt-

plural portmanteaus or portmanteaux

-tōz

: traveling bag