| Blend (linguistics) |
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Blend is the term used in Linguistics to describe the formation of a word from parts (often but not necessarily Morphemes ) of two other words. Outside linguistics, this type of word formation is called '' Portmanteau ''. BLENDS IN THE MEDIA James Joyce used blends extensively in '' Finnegans Wake ''. Many corporate Brand Name s, trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations themselves, are blends. For example, Wikipedia is a blend made from '' Wiki '' and '' Encyclopedia '', and Wiktionary , one of Wikipedia's sister projects, is a blend of '' Wiki '' and '' Dictionary ''. Also, Nabisco is a blend of the initial syllables of National Biscuit Company. In the 21st Century, Tabloid writers often blend the first names of famous couples. Some examples include '' Bennifer '' (for both Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez , and Affleck and Jennifer Garner ) and ''TomKat'' (for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes ). FORMATION Most blends are formed by one of the following methods: # Part of the sounds of both components are mixed in a "creative" way, mostly preserving their order, e.g., ''slithy'' in an example above. This method was preferred by Lewis Carroll , but is not much in use otherwise. # The beginning of one word is prepended to the end of the other, e.g., '' Breakfast '' + '' Lunch '' = '' Brunch ''. Sometimes the letter/sound at the boundary is common to both components, e.g., ''smoke'' + ''fog'' = '' Smog ''. This is the most common method of blending. # Both components contain a common sequence of letters or sounds. The blend is composed of the beginning of the first component, the common part and the end of the second component. This is a less frequent kind of blend. For example, the word '' Californication '', popularized by the Red Hot Chili Peppers , sounds as if it were ''California'' + ''fornication'' . # 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. (From the article Gairaigo .) SEE ALSO Some other types of words that combine parts of otherwords but are not blends include the following:
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