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In linguistics, a blend—also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or portmanteau [a] —is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together. [2] [3] [4] English examples include smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, [3] [5] and motel, from motor and hotel. [6] A blend is similar to a ...
A lexical blend is a complex word typically made of two word fragments. For example: smog is a blend of smoke and fog; brunch is a blend of breakfast and lunch. [6] stagflation is a blend of stagnation and inflation [1] chunnel is a blend of channel and tunnel, [1] referring to the Channel Tunnel
It is a special case of a type of word formation called clipping. Clipped compounds are common in various slang and jargon vocabularies, [1] but they are not specific to those. Examples in English include sci fi, comp sci, lab tech, and surg tech. A clipped compound word is linguistically a type of blend word.
Neologisms are often formed by combining existing words (see compound noun and adjective) or by giving words new and unique suffixes or prefixes. [9] Neologisms can also be formed by blending words, for example, "brunch" is a blend of the words "breakfast" and "lunch", or through abbreviation or acronym, by intentionally rhyming with existing words or simply through playing with sounds.
Back-formation is either the process of creating a new lexeme (less precisely, a new "word") by removing actual or supposed affixes, or a neologism formed by such a process. Back-formations are shortened words created from longer words, thus back-formations may be viewed as a sub-type of clipping .
Clipping differs from abbreviation, which is based on a shortening of the written, rather than the spoken, form of an existing word or phrase. Clipping is also different from back-formation, which proceeds by (pseudo-)morpheme rather than segment, and where the new word may differ in sense and word class from its source. [2]
The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme). The distinction between ...
In English, verbification typically involves simple conversion of a non-verb to a verb. The verbs to verbify and to verb, the first by derivation with an affix and the second by zero derivation, are themselves products of verbification (see autological word), and, as might be guessed, the term to verb is often used more specifically, to refer only to verbification that does not involve a ...