Portmanteaux in engineering

Updated November 13, 2011

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This page probably falls somewhere in between trivia and useless information, but we'll go ahead and paste it up anyway, on account of we have terabytes of bandwidth...

Portmanteaux (that's the plural of portmanteau, do you ken, laddie?) are literary devices that combine two words into one with a blended meaning, like motel (motor hotel), spork (spoon fork) and skorts (skirt shorts, sometimes simply "skort"). Portmanteau is similar, but different from an acronym, which uses just a letter or two of words in a string to produce a new word or name.

The origin of the word has something to do with a suitcase that had two compartments, according to Wikipedia. Check out Wikipedia's post on Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and you'll learn portmanteau from the master.

Engineers (and their friends in marketing) tend to be portmanteau creators, without even knowing the term. We'll throw out a few here, if you can think of any more, send them in! Thanks most recently (November 2010) go to to Mark for several of these, especially the aerospace-related terms!!

alnico (aluminum nickel cobalt) technically this might be considered an acronym...

avionics (aviation electronics)

balun (balanced unbalanced)

blog (web log)

codec (coder-decoder)

compansion, compander (compression expansion)

elevon (elevator aileron)

email (electronic mail)

flexguide (flexible waveguide)

Flybrid (flywheel hybrid, a cool new technology for storing an releasing kinetic energy, the name is trademarked by a British Company, Flybrid Systems)

Fractenna (fractal antenna, thanks to Thomas! Fractal Antenna is an antenna company)

FraudoCAD (free AutoCAD)

gigital (gigahertz digital)

Greengineering (green engineering, actually a trademark of a land development company that should be able to cash in on it)

HiFi (high fidelity, remember that?)

klystron (Greek word "klyzo", which refers to waves breaking on a beach, combined with "electron")

linac (linear accelerator)

mantenna (man antenna)

magnetron (magnet electron) thanks to Giorgio from Italy!

memristor (memory resistor)

modem (modulator demodulator) also thanks to Giorgio from Italy!

multipactor (multiple impactor)

nichrome (nickel chromium)

op-amp (operational amplifier)

photonics (photo electronics)

Pokemon (pocket monster) Come to think of it, many of Pokemon names are portmanteaux...

radome (radar dome)

rectenna (rectifier antenna)

rectax (rectangular coax)

robocop (robot cop)

rojo (rotary joint)

satcom (satellite communications, often SATCOM)

squarax (square coax)

sysop (system operator)

smog (smoke fog) (thanks to Drew!)

stiction (static friction)

thermistor (thermal resistor)

transceiver (transmitter receiver) (thanks to Drew!)

transistor (transfer resistor)

transponder (transmitter responder)

turbojet (turbine jet)

turbofan (turbine ducted fan)

varactor (voltage variable capacitor)

varistor (voltage variable resistor) (thanks to Drew!)

WiMax (wireless maximum)

WiFi (wireless fidelity)

WiGig (Wireless Gigabit)

Keep them coming, girls and boys!