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:

• The first one works on the same entered word, generating millions of variants, however, on the same strange principle. From Habrahabr it generates among other things HABRAHABRICK = habrahabr + brick. No idea, and here is a brick, but it sounds gentle in Russian.
• The second one is much cooler - it takes a few words and sculpts pairs from them, and not everything, but sifting out frank garbage. The issue is more interesting.
• The third one, in accordance with the specified settings, mixes the entered word with its dictionary, but the size of the output is not as insane as the first one. In addition, without departing from the cash register, you can check the availability of the domain with the newly invented word.

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



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