Use the free Blend Generator below to blend any two words into portmanteau candidates, or browse all 79 curated words.
Discover our guide with the list of blended words to use in your writing . Add some personality to your next writing project or novel with these unique words . Using blended words spices up writing by combining two words to form another. It’s similar to how parents decide to smash their names together to form their child’s name. These words merge attributes and definitions to describe a contempora
Type two words to generate portmanteau candidates, or browse blended words already in English.
Blended words, also called portmanteau words, fuse parts of two existing words into a single new one that carries both meanings, the way breakfast and lunch collapse into brunch. Blends are one of the fastest ways English coins vocabulary for new inventions, habits, and social types, which is why so many of them come from technology, media, and everyday life. The groups below sort common blends by the world they came from, and the example sentences show each one working in ordinary prose.
Computing has produced more blends than any other field, compressing technical phrases like web log, picture element, and binary digit into words we now type without thinking.
Daily routines generate cheerful blends, from the meal between breakfast and lunch to the hotel built for motorists and the vacation spent staying home.
Broadcasting and film love a blend, fusing situation with comedy, biography with picture, and information with entertainment to name whole genres.
Blends are handy for naming social types, joining friend with enemy, work with alcoholic, and stalker with fan to capture a personality in one word.
Institutions compress long official phrases into blends, so hazardous materials becomes hazmat, foreign exchange becomes forex, and international police becomes Interpol.
Some blends exist mostly for fun, exaggerating size, hedging a number, or naming a smoky fog, and their two parents are usually audible at a glance.
Sparklines show each word's usage in published books since 1800 (Google Books Ngram data). The dot marks the peak decade.
Tap any word to see it used in a sentence.
The magazine ran an advertorial that read like an article until the final paragraph pitched the advertiser's cruise line.
The neighbors threw a birthday bash that rattled windows two streets away.
Every pub quiz team needs one brainiac who remembers state capitals.
Too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, we settled on brunch by the river.
The two managers clash over budgets at every quarterly meeting.
The magician's final trick continues to dumbfound audiences who film it frame by frame.
Frayed wiring like that could electrocute someone; call an electrician before executing any more repairs yourself.
The runners crossed the finish line riding an endorphin high.
In the punk era, fans photocopied a fanzine after hours and sold their magazine at gigs.
She counts her old college rival as a frenemy, half friend and half enemy depending on the week.
A helicopter lifted off from the hospital's rooftop heliport just after dawn.
The channel drifted from hard information toward infotainment, all countdowns and celebrity panels.
The keyboardist strapped on a keytar and strutted the stage like a guitarist.
One click on the malicious attachment installed malware across the whole office network.
He restored a 1970s motorcycle, half motor and half bicycle frame, in his garden shed.
The multiplex on the edge of town shows twelve films on a Saturday.
The evening newscast led with the flood before broadcasting the sports results.
A gray blanket of smog, equal parts smoke and fog, hung over the valley until the wind changed.
The retired striker now anchors a Saturday sportscast.
He watches three sportscasts a night during playoff season.
The television marathon raised two hours of pledges before midnight; the telethon ran until dawn.
Regulators worried the sweet alcopop bottles looked too much like soda pop.
The linguistics course surveyed several Amerind language families.
The studio announced a biopic tracing the singer's life from choir loft to stadium.
Her cosplay fused a hand-sewn costume with props from the hardware store.
The novel's hero is a cyborg, more organism than machine on his good days.
Send the contract by email and follow up with a call.
He spent his twenties trading forex from a laptop in rented rooms.
The puppy grew into a ginormous dog, somewhere between gigantic and enormous.
A hazmat crew in sealed suits handled the leaking drums of hazardous material.
The farm looks traditional but runs on hi-tech sensors and drone surveys.
She moved from teaching into infotech consulting during the dot-com years.
The village finally got fast Internet, and half the residents now work from home.
Interpol circulated the stolen painting's photograph to police forces on four continents.
The old modem screeched for thirty seconds before the connection held.
She weaves her moped, part motor and part pedal power, through the market traffic.
The documentary examined the decision to use napalm in the campaign.
The book club alternates between sci-fi and historical fiction.
Critics dismissed the film as sexploitation dressed up in art-house lighting.
The sitcom mined one situation, a family-run deli, for nine seasons of comedy.
Her weekly vlog turned a video diary of the renovation into a career.
The architect praised the bridge's beautility, insisting beauty and utility were never rivals.
A single bit, one binary digit, flipped and crashed the whole simulation.
The clinic's waiting room was full of first-time Botox patients pretending to read magazines.
The gym's boxercise class delivers a boxing workout without an opponent punching back.
They took the train through the Chunnel, under the Channel by tunnel, and were in Paris by noon.
The funeral director explained the options for keeping or scattering the cremains.
He ended the stern memo with a winking emoticon that undercut the whole thing.
The novel is really faction, weaving documented facts through invented conversations.
Asked for exact numbers, the contractor offered a guesstimate, halfway between a guess and an estimate.
She travels in jeggings, which pass for jeans but stretch like leggings on a long flight.
The Labradoodle inherited the Labrador's temperament and the poodle's curls.
The columnist crowned him a metrosexual for his skincare shelf and tailored coats.
The bar's mocktail menu mimics every cocktail on the list, minus the alcohol.
They pulled off the highway at a neon-lit motel built for weary motorists.
Zoom in far enough and every picture surrenders into pixel squares.
The pamphlet dismissed undecided voters as sheeple who follow the loudest voice.
The forum has its own slanguage that newcomers need a week to decode.
The transistor shrank room-sized computers into pocket radios within a generation.
By four she could recite the alphabet backward for anyone who asked.
Choose an alphanumeric password that mixes letters and numbers.
His blog began as a web log of daily bike commutes and grew into a cycling magazine.
The officer asked him to breathe into the Breathalyzer at the checkpoint.
The Bollywood premiere brought Mumbai traffic to a standstill.
Dad's camcorder, camera and recorder in one brick-sized box, captured every school play.
The docudrama restaged the trial with actors reading the court transcripts.
Their idea of glamping was a canvas tent with a chandelier and a proper mattress.
A humongous pumpkin took first prize and two men to lift it.
He drafted his first novel in a laundromat, one chapter per spin cycle.
Commuters grab a Mobike at the station and pedal the last mile to work.
The president's motorcade swept past in a hiss of tires and flags.
The school invited a lawyer to talk to parents about teenagers and sexting.
Skylab, America's first space laboratory, hosted three crews before it fell from orbit.
The camping set's spork does the work of spoon and fork in one utensil.
He will stan that band on every platform until the servers give out.
With flights so expensive, they opted for a staycation and toured their own city.
Orange juice fortified with vitamin C got the whole family through winter.
The webinar drew three hundred attendees, which no seminar room could have held.
A self-confessed workaholic, she answers email during the previews at the movies.
A blended word fuses parts of two existing words into one new word that combines their meanings. Brunch blends breakfast and lunch, smog blends smoke and fog, and motel blends motor and hotel. Blends differ from compounds because at least one of the source words loses some of its letters in the fusion.
Everyday examples include brunch from breakfast and lunch, smog from smoke and fog, email from electronic and mail, sitcom from situation and comedy, motel from motor and hotel, and spork from spoon and fork. Technology supplies many more, such as blog from web log, pixel from picture element, and malware from malicious software. The word list on this page collects dozens of them with the source words visible in each example sentence.
A compound word joins two whole words with all their letters intact, as in notebook or firefighter. A blend clips at least one of its source words before joining them, so breakfast and lunch shed letters on their way to brunch. If you can still see both complete words inside the new one, it is a compound rather than a blend.
Most blends start as informal coinages that name something new faster than a full phrase can, and they stick when enough people find them useful. Writers, advertisers, and internet communities mint them constantly, which is why recent decades gave us staycation, glamping, and webinar. A blend earns a dictionary entry once it appears widely in print with a stable meaning.
Yes, portmanteau is simply the older literary name for the same thing. Lewis Carroll popularized the term in Through the Looking-Glass, comparing such words to a portmanteau, a suitcase that opens into two halves, because two meanings are packed into one word. Linguists today usually say blend, but both terms are correct.
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