A portmanteau is a word or morpheme that fuses two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded meaning. A folk usage of portmanteau refers to a word formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words (e.g., spork from spoon and fork, animatronics from animated and electronics, ginormous from gigantic and enormous, or blaxploitation from black and exploitation or guesstimate from guess and estimate). Typically, portmanteaux are nonce words or neologisms - in recent years, the practice of creating them has become known as "smushing" or "smooshing", and can often be seen playing an active minor role in some online media discussion. Portmanteaux are commonly used in science fiction for a wide variety of technical words, such as cyborg from cybernetic and organism.
