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Wallet words around us

With the submission of colleagues from Lingvo, a regular post with the tag " English lessons ".

- You see, this word is like a wallet. Open, and there are two branches!
So Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice the linguistic phenomenon of composition by the example of the words "shrewd", "Zeluks" and "boiled" from the famous poem "Barmaglot".

But the “words-wallets” ( portmanteau word ), invented by the writer Lewis Carroll, it turns out, are found not only in fairy tales. Take a closer look - they surround us everywhere: well established ( smog = smoke + fog, cyborg = cybernetic + organism) and not so ( chillax = chill out + relax), many company names ( Microsoft = microcomputer + software) and even countries ( Tanzania = Tanganyika + Zanzibar).
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A peculiar fashion for making word-wallets has spawned many neologisms these days. Here are just some of them:

Intel is, if anyone did not know, integrated and electronics
Verizon - veritas (Latin “truth”) + horizon
Compaq - compatibility and quality
Skype = Sky + peer-to-peer
pixel - it turns out, picture and element
widget - window gadget. Everyone already knew, right?
bit - binary and digit
blog - web and log
brouter is not brother and router, as one might think, but quite a bridge-router
brogrammer - brother and programmer

By the way, Wikipedia (which, of course, is also a word-wallet), suggests that there are sites that are ready to generate portmanteaus for us without registration and SMS:


We propose to squeeze (well, you understand) new words or share our recent discoveries in this area.

And yes, the hub "Translations" ceased to exist some time ago, and now there is no replacement for it. Therefore, subscribe to the company's blog , so as not to miss the " English lessons ."

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/212175/


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