Blend word
In linguistics, a blend (sometimes called blend word, lexical blend, portmanteau or portmanteau word) is a word formed from parts of two or more other words. At least one of these parts is not a morph (the realization of a morpheme) but instead a mere "splinter", a fragment that is normally meaningless: In words such as "motel, boatel" and "Lorry-Tel", "hotel" is represented by various shorter substitutes – "otel, tel" or "el" – which I shall call splinters. Words containing splinters I shall call blends. Classification. Blends of two or more words may be classified from each of three  viewpoints: morphotactic, morphonological, and morphosemantic. Morphotactic classification. Blends may be classified morphotactically into two kinds: "total" and "partial". Total blends. In a total blend, each of the words creating the blend is reduced to a mere splinter. Some linguists limit blends to these (perhaps with additional conditions): for example, Ingo Plag considers "proper blends" to be total blends that semantically are coordinate, the remainder being "shortened compounds". Commonly for English blends, the beginning of one word is followed by the end of another: Much less commonly in English, the beginning of one word may be followed by the beginning of  another: Some linguists do not regard beginning+beginning concatenations as blends, instead calling them complex clippings, clipping compounds or clipped compounds. Unusually in English, the end of one word may be followed by the end of another: A splinter of one word may replace part of another, as in three coined by Lewis Carroll in "Jabberwocky": They are sometimes termed "intercalative" blends; these words are among the original "portmanteaus" for which this meaning of the word was created. Partial blends. In a partial blend, one entire word is concatenated with a splinter from another. Some linguists do not recognize these as  blends. An entire word may be followed by a splinter: A splinter may be followed by an entire word: An entire word may replace part of another: These have also been called "sandwich" words, and classed among "intercalative" blends. Morphonological classification. Morphonologically, blends fall into two kinds: "overlapping" and "non-overlapping". Overlapping blends. Overlapping blends are those for which the ingredients' consonants, vowels or even syllables overlap to some extent. The overlap can be of different kinds. These are also called haplologic blends. There may be an overlap that is both phonological and orthographic, but with no other shortening: The  overlap may be both phonological and orthographic, and with some additional shortening to at least one of the ingredients: Such an overlap may be discontinuous: These are also termed imperfect blends. It can occur with three components: The phonological overlap need not also be orthographic: If the phonological but non-orthographic overlap encompasses the whole of the shorter ingredient, as in then the effect depends on orthography alone. (They are also called orthographic blends.) An orthographic overlap need not also be phonological: For some linguists, an overlap is a condition for a blend. Non-overlapping blends. Non-overlapping blends (also  called substitution blends) have no overlap, whether phonological or orthographic: Morphosemantic classification. Morphosemantically, blends fall into two kinds: "attributive" and "coordinate". Attributive blends. Attributive blends (also called syntactic or telescope blends) are those in which one of the ingredients is the head and the other is attributive. A "porta-light" is a portable light, not a 'light-emitting' or light portability; "light" is the head. A "snobject" is a snobbery-satisfying object and not an objective or other kind of snob; object is the head. As is also true for (conventional, non-blend) attributive compounds (among which "bathroom", for example , is a kind of room, not a kind of bath), the attributive blends of English are mostly head-final and mostly endocentric. As an example of an exocentric attributive blend, "Fruitopia" may metaphorically take the buyer to a fruity utopia (and not a utopian fruit); however, it is not a utopia but a drink. Coordinate blends. Coordinate blends (also called associative or portmanteau blends) combine two words having equal status, and have two heads. Thus "brunch" is neither a breakfasty lunch nor a lunchtime breakfast but instead some hybrid of breakfast and lunch; "Oxbridge" is equally Oxford and Cambridge universities . This too parallels (conventional, non-blend) compounds: an "actor–director" is equally an actor and a director. Two kinds of coordinate blends are particularly conspicuous: those that combine (near) synonyms: and those that combine (near) opposites: Blending of two roots. Blending can also apply to roots rather than words, for instance in Israeli Hebrew: "There are two possible etymological analyses for Israeli Hebrew כספר "kaspár" 'bank clerk, teller'. The first is that it consists of (Hebrew>) Israeli כסף "késef" 'money' and the (International/Hebrew>) Israeli agentive suffix ר- "-ár". The second is that it is a quasi-portmanteau  word which blends כסף "késef" 'money' and (Hebrew>) Israeli ספר √spr 'count'. Israeli Hebrew כספר "kaspár" started as a brand name but soon entered the common language. Even if the second analysis is the correct one, the final syllable ר- "-ár" apparently facilitated nativization since it was regarded as the Hebrew suffix ר- "-år" (probably of Persian pedigree), which usually refers to craftsmen and professionals, for instance as in Mendele Mocher Sforim's coinage סמרטוטר "smartutár" 'rag-dealer'." Lexical selection. Blending may occur with an error in "lexical selection", the process by which a speaker uses his semantic knowledge  to choose words. Lewis Carroll's explanation, which gave rise to the use of 'portmanteau' for such combinations, was: Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words ... you will say "frumious." The errors are based on similarity of meanings, rather than phonological similarities, and the morphemes or phonemes stay in the same position within the syllable. Use. Some languages, like Japanese, encourage the shortening and merging of  borrowed foreign words (as in gairaigo), because they are long or difficult to pronounce in the target language. For example, "karaoke", a combination of the Japanese word "kara" (meaning "empty") and the clipped form "oke" of the English loanword "orchestra" (J. "ōkesutora" オーケストラ), is a Japanese blend that has entered the English language. The Vietnamese language also encourages blend words formed from Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary. For example, the term Việt Cộng is derived from the first syllables of "Việt Nam" (Vietnam) and "Cộng sản" (communist). Many corporate brand names, trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations  themselves, are blends. For example, Wiktionary, one of Wikipedia's sister projects, is a blend of "wiki" and "dictionary".