Welcome to the PortmanteauRing

Welcome to PortmanteauRing, where today's blogging hobbyist is tomorrow's entreblogeur. I have dedicated this site to collecting documenting the various portmanteau words of the English language, whether they be in standard usage, of fairly recent origin, or of extemporaneous coinage.

To that end, I will categorize the words documented here (via tags) based on (my understanding of) their general usage:

• established: Portmanteau words that have been around for a while and are generally in common usage. You might not have even known they were portmanteau words.
• recent: Portmanteau words that have occurred fairly recently (say, within the last 50 years), but that are generally agreed upon as useful words.
• coined: Portmanteaux that writers (mostly netizens) have come up with extemporaneously to express themselves.
• double: A double portmanteau, such as the name of this blog, combines three words instead of just two; or it could involve combining two words, one of which is already a portmanteau.
• trademark/copyright: Some business owners really get into wordplay, using portmanteau to name products, product lines, or even the company itself.

I will also occasionally write about specific words (or word parts) that are rather often used to create new portmanteaux. They'll be tagged as tipteau.

Also keep an eye out for words coined by the masters of portmanteau: the writers on The Colbert Report. They'll be tagged as Colbertism.

Eventually, I'll get around to creating a master list of all the words I document here. Someday.

I plan to model the format of this blog along the lines of Mark Peters's Wordlustitude blog. Thanks to him for his tacit inspiration. If PortmanteauRing is the kind of thing you enjoy, then you'll probably get a kick out of Wordlustitude, too, so check it out.

If you've gotten this far and are still wondering exactly what a portmanteau word even is, just go to the next blog post.