The word portmanteau has lived two remarkable lives in English. In its first life, beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, it meant a large leather traveling case that opened into two equal compartments. In its second life, launched by Lewis Carroll in 1871, it became the standard linguistic term for a word formed by blending two others. Both meanings share the same metaphorical logic: two things packed together into one container.
The French original, portemanteau, is a compound of porter (to carry, from Latin portare) and manteau (a cloak or mantle, from Latin mantellum). A portemanteau was originally a court official who carried a prince's cloak, then the word transferred to the bag in which the cloak was carried, and finally to any large traveling bag with two hinged compartments. This progression from person to container is a common pattern in the history of object names.
English adopted portmanteau in the mid-sixteenth century for the luggage sense. The two-compartment design was practical for horseback travel, allowing a rider to balance weight equally on either side of a pack animal. Portmanteau bags remained standard traveling equipment through the nineteenth century, when they were gradually replaced by modern suitcases and trunks.
The word's linguistic second life began with Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871). In a famous passage, Humpty Dumpty explains the meaning of the nonsense poem Jabberwocky to Alice. When Alice asks about the word slithy, Humpty Dumpty replies: Well, slithy means lithe and slimy. You see it's like a portmanteau — there
This coinage filled a genuine need in linguistic terminology. English had been creating blended words for centuries — Lewis Carroll himself coined chortle from chuckle and snort — but there was no established term for the process. Portmanteau word, later shortened simply to portmanteau, became the standard label used by linguists and writers alike.
Modern English is rich in portmanteau words: brunch (breakfast + lunch), smog (smoke + fog), motel (motor + hotel), podcast (iPod + broadcast), and blog (web + log) are among the most familiar. The digital age has accelerated portmanteau creation, producing emoji (emotion + pictograph, though actually from Japanese), malware (malicious + software), and fintech (financial + technology).
The dual meaning of portmanteau is itself a kind of portmanteau situation — two distinct senses packed into one word. This pleasing recursiveness has made portmanteau a favorite example in discussions of linguistic creativity and semantic change.