Portmanteau Definition

pôrt-măntō, pôrtmăn-tō

portmanteaus, portmanteaux

noun

portmanteaus, portmanteaux

A traveling case or bag; esp., a stiff leather suitcase that opens like a book into two compartments.

Webster's New World

A word formed by merging the sounds and meanings of two different words, as chortle, from chuckle and snort.

American Heritage

A word or part of a word that is analyzable as consisting of more than one morpheme without a clear boundary between them, as French du “of the” from de “of” and le “the.”

American Heritage

(Australia, dated) A school bag; often shortened to port or school port.

Wiktionary

Synonyms:

adjective

General or generalized.

A portmanteau description; portmanteau terms.

American Heritage

(used only before a noun, of a word, story, etc.) Made by combining two (more) words, stories, etc., in the manner of a linguistic portmanteau.

Wiktionary

Other Word Forms of Portmanteau

Noun

Singular:

portmanteau

Plural:

portmanteaus, portmanteaux

Origin of Portmanteau

French portemanteau porte- from porter to carry (from Old French port⁵) manteau cloak (from Old French mantel) (from Latin mantellum) N., senses 2a and b, in reference to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, in which Humpty Dumpty explains slithy and other made-up words in the poem “Jabberwocky” to Alice as follows: “Slithy” means “lithe and slimy” ... You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word

From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
Coined by Lewis Carroll in Through The Looking Glass to describe the words he coined in Jabberwocky.

From Wiktionary
From French portemanteau, literally porte (“carry") + manteau (“coat")

From Wiktionary