Portmanteau words: how brunch, smog and podcast were blended

Words & word games · By the Letterbench editorial team · Published 2026-10-31

Brunch, smog, motel, podcast, spork: each of these is two words squeezed into one, with a piece of each partner left on the cutting-room floor. Linguists call them blends; everyone else tends to call them portmanteau words, a name that comes from a talking egg in a children's book. This note explains what counts as a blend, how they are built, why some stick and most do not, and what that means for anyone who writes, plays word games or maintains a word list.

Where the name comes from

A portmanteau was a large travelling case that opened into two equal halves, the word itself borrowed from French porter ("to carry") and manteau ("cloak"). Lewis Carroll turned it into a linguistic term in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, published at the end of 1871. Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain the nonsense poem "Jabberwocky", and he begins with its first strange word:

"Well, 'slithy' means 'lithe and slimy.' 'Lithe' is the same as 'active.' You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word."

He goes on to gloss mimsy as "flimsy and miserable", and the idea of two meanings folded into one case has been called a portmanteau ever since. The Library of Congress has a digitised early edition of the book, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1900), if you want to read the scene in context.

Carroll did more than name the process. Two of his inventions from "Jabberwocky" made it into ordinary English: chortle, usually explained as a mix of chuckle and snort, and galumph, often explained as gallop plus triumphant. In the preface to The Hunting of the Snark (1876) he returned to the theory with frumious, which he said combined fuming and furious: if you cannot decide which of two words to say, and your thoughts lean neither way, you will say both at once.

What counts as a blend

A blend joins two (occasionally three) existing words and drops part of at least one of them. That last condition is what separates a blend from its neighbours:

Compound: both words survive whole. Notebook, toothbrush, spell checker. Nothing is cut.
Clipping: a single word is shortened. Phone from telephone, flu from influenza, exam from examination.
Clipped compound: both parts of a phrase are shortened, usually keeping the beginning of each. Sitcom (situation comedy) and sci-fi (science fiction) sit on the border with blends; some linguists file them separately because the cut always falls at the end of each word.
Acronym or initialism: only initial letters remain. Laser, NATO, FAQ. A blend keeps far more of its source words than one letter each.
Blend: typically the start of one word plus the end of another, and often sharing sounds where they meet. Smoke + fog gives smog; breakfast + lunch gives brunch; motor + hotel gives motel.

The boundaries are fuzzy, but a blend always asks the reader to recover two words from fragments, which is why the best ones keep enough of each partner to be recognised.

Four ways to fuse two words

Most English blends follow one of a few patterns. Seeing them makes it easier both to spot blends and to build good ones.

1. Beginning of one, end of the other

This is the classic shape: br(eakfast) + (l)unch, sm(oke) + (f)og, sp(oon) + (f)ork, mo(tor) + (ho)tel. The cut usually falls at a syllable or sound boundary, so the result is easy to say. Modern examples include emoticon and glamping.

2. Overlap

The neatest blends share letters or sounds at the seam, so that nothing seems to be missing. Motel keeps the o of both motor and hotel; slanguage (slang + language) shares the whole lang sequence. Overlap is what makes a blend feel inevitable rather than forced, and it is why Carroll's slithy works: lithe and slimy already share the li sound.

3. One word whole, the other cut

Sometimes one partner survives intact and only the other is trimmed: podcast keeps broadcast's second half but only the pod of iPod; staycation keeps all of stay and the end of vacation; bromance keeps romance and adds the b of brother.

4. Splinters that become suffixes

When the same fragment is used again and again, it stops behaving like part of a blend and starts acting as a new suffix. Linguists call such pieces splinters. -holic was cut from alcoholic and now produces workaholic and chocoholic; -gate, from the Watergate scandal, marks almost any scandal; -tarian, from vegetarian, gives flexitarian. Brexit (Britain + exit) spawned a short-lived crop of copies for other countries, and was chosen as Collins Dictionary's word of the year in 2016.

A few famous blends and their stories

Dates for coinages are always first recorded uses, not moments of invention, and dictionaries revise them as earlier citations turn up. With that caveat:

Smog was in use in Britain in the early 1900s to describe the thick, sooty fogs of industrial cities, before air pollution regulation made the word less literal and more general.
Brunch began as British student slang in the 1890s for a late meal that does the job of both breakfast and lunch.
Motel dates from the 1920s in the United States, when roadside hotels with parking at the door spread with car travel.
Podcast appears in a February 2004 Guardian article by the journalist Ben Hammersley, who floated it as one possible name for the new habit of downloading audio shows to an MP3 player. The New Oxford American Dictionary named it word of the year for 2005.

Why most blends vanish

For every brunch there are hundreds of blends that appear in one headline and are never seen again. A few factors seem to decide which survive:

A gap to fill. Smog and motel named something with no short name. A blend that merely decorates an existing word has nothing to do.
Recoverability. Readers must be able to see both sources. Spork passes instantly; a blend that keeps one letter of a partner forces the reader to guess.
Sound. The result has to follow English sound patterns and stress. Blends that produce awkward clusters are hard to say and rarely spread.
Repetition across sources. As we explain in our note on how a word gets into the dictionary, lexicographers wait for sustained use by many independent writers, not one clever coinage.

Over time a successful blend becomes opaque: few people who order brunch think of it as two words at all. That is the same drift that turns once-transparent phrases into the half-understood idioms behind eggcorns, described in eggcorns, malapropisms and mondegreens.

Blends and spell checkers

A spell checker works from a list of known words, so a brand-new blend is flagged as an error until someone adds it. That is usually the right call: an unknown blend is far more often a typo than a coinage. It also explains why established blends such as brunch pass while last week's invention does not. If you coin a blend on purpose, add it to your personal dictionary rather than training yourself to ignore red underlines. Our free spell checker runs entirely in your browser and lets you check a text that is full of deliberate inventions without sending it anywhere.

Making your own (that people understand)

Blends are a good word game, on paper or with letter tiles. Some practical rules from the patterns above:

Pick two words whose meanings genuinely combine: the blend should name something that is really a cross between them.
Look for shared letters or sounds and cut there. Overlap makes a blend feel natural.
Keep the stressed syllable of at least one source; it is the part the ear uses to identify the word.
Say it aloud. If you stumble, try cutting at a different point.
Test it on someone without explaining. If they cannot name both sources, it needs more of one word.

As a game, draw two word cards and give everyone a minute to make the best blend and define it. Carroll worked the other way round, inventing the blend first and letting readers work out its meaning. Either way, the pleasure is close to solving an anagram, which is why blends sit next to the games in our field guide to word play.