Mansplaining, Chillax and Brexit: Blended words in English

Blended words (also called portmanteau words) such as Brexit, Mansplaining and Chillax are popular in modern English. In this article we analyse a huge collection of spoken British English (the Spoken British National Corpus 2014) to uncover which blended words we use and how we use them.

A blend word or portmanteau is a word made up of parts of two (or more) other words, and whose meaning combines the meanings of the two other words, e.g.:

Breakfast + Lunch → Brunch
Morning meal + Midday meal → Mid-morning meal

This combination has created a new word brunch and a new meaning of mid-morning meal. Blend words are usually made up of the beginning of the first word and the end of the second word (like brunch). We can also use the beginnings of two words, e.g. email from “electronic + mail”. The word portmanteau was originally invented by Lewis Carroll, referring to a suitcase where you stuff clothes in both sides and then close them together. He used this to form more “spliced” patterns of words like slithy which is from lithe (soft) + slimy. These types are rarer though. Sometimes more than two words can be used, as in TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal Street), or turducken, from turkey + duck + chicken. There must be some sounds left out or changed, otherwise it would just be a hyphenated word like “spoon-fork”, which although would be pronounced as one word, is not a proper blend word (unlike spork).

The popularity of blend words

Blend words are popular partly because they allow us to condense language, e.g. by merging two syllables which sound the same. This is called haplology and is even present in the word England itself, which used to be Engla Land, so originally England was a blend word! Sometimes the blend words form a family based on a common component, e.g. the -exit family: Brexit ← Britain + exit; Grexit ← Greece + exit; and many other possibilities, even Texit ← Texas + exit.

So one blend word might inspire other similar ones, e.g. alcoholic inspired workaholic and shopaholic. Other families include -ware (hardware, software, freeware, etc) and -nomics (economics, Freakonomics, Raeganomics, Trumponomics, etc). But, confusingly, a word inside a blend word doesn’t have to have the same form, e.g. poodle can become -oodle or -poo, e.g. Cockerpoo, Labradoodle. This may be due to which combinations work best together. Some words may not form a simple blend. When combining man + explaining → mansplaining (a man patronising a woman), the -x- has changed to an -s- to avoid a “non-English” sound sequence of n + ex + s + p + l, which would be quite a mouthful.

Blend words clearly can increase efficiency, but acronyms can be even more efficient, e.g. YOLO (=You Only Live Once) or LOL (laugh out loud) saves time to say when spoken as an acronym, which is increasingly common. Blend words may also increase memorability, since they often have a certain ring to them, such as spam, probably from spiced + ham. The harsh sound of the word may have led to its use in the famous Monty Python sketch and later meaning of junk emails.

Evidence of blend words being used in English

The popularity of blend words is partly due to the fact they are easy to make up, and so a lot of them are introduced in the media and online, e.g. about celebrity couples (e.g. Brad [Pitt]+ Angelina [Jolie]→ Brangelina), or the cronut, part croissant part doughnut. For this reason it is hard to know how many there are in English, as new ones could be coined as you are reading this, but a look at the Wikipedia list contains about 800 blend words, some more famous than others, and indeed the word Wikipedia itself.

To find out how many new blend words are made each year (only a rough estimate), we looked at new dictionary word lists and counted the blends in them: about 20-25% of all new words in the Cambridge new words list are blend words.

How often are blend words used in the English language based on corpus research? We took a list of about a thousand blend words and counted them in our corpus. The top blend words in the Cambridge English Corpus (excluding proper nouns) are shown below:

The top frequency blend words in a sample of new spoken British English are as follows:

Summary

Blend words are popular in modern English and there are a lot of possibilities for designing them. They are interesting because they can capture the mood of a time, e.g. Brexit, or they can form families of similar items. Blend words expand a language, adding new words and new concepts. They appear to exist in every language, and they are quite democratic in that it is easy for anyone to make up new ones which might end up becoming popular English words.

Have your students noticed these words or attempted making up new ones? Can you think of some useful or funny blend words which could be added to the English language? Which sound the funniest? Which have the strangest meaning? Tell us in the comments below!

Read more insights from the Corpus in our post Using “Yeah no” in spoken English.

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