24 Funny Portmanteau Words From Urban Dictionary, Explained

Some feelings and habits are so familiar that it is strange English has no word for them: the pile of clothes on the bedroom chair, the passenger who nods off the moment the engine starts, the friend who vanishes as soon as they start dating. Internet users have filled many of these gaps with portmanteaus, new words made by squeezing two existing words into one.

The twenty-four below were collected from Urban Dictionary, the crowd-written slang site, and turned into a popular set of picture cards that circulated online in 2015. Each one is shown with its card, followed by a short note on how the word is built and why it works. A few are clever, a few are silly, and one or two describe something real enough that you may find yourself using them.

The word on the first card, askhole, sets the tone. It describes someone who keeps firing off pointless or obnoxious questions, and it works by swapping a single letter in a ruder word everyone already knows. That is the secret of most good blends: the listener recognises both halves instantly, so the joke lands without explanation. Before the list, a quick look at where this kind of word comes from.

What a portmanteau word is

The term comes from Lewis Carroll. In Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice that “slithy” in the poem “Jabberwocky” means slimy and lithe, packed together like the two halves of a portmanteau, a travelling case that opened into two equal compartments. Linguists today usually call these words blends.

A blend differs from a compound. A compound keeps both words whole, as in “starfish”. A blend clips at least one of them, as in “brunch”, from breakfast and lunch, which the British magazine Punch introduced as a “portmanteau word” in 1896. Other blends have become so ordinary that most people no longer notice them: smog (smoke and fog), motel (motor and hotel), Microsoft (microcomputer and software), and even the country name Tanzania, chosen in 1964 when Tanganyika and Zanzibar united.

Blends tend to appear at a particular moment and spread fast if they fill a need. “Brexit” is a recent example. Most internet blends never get that far, but they are fun precisely because they show the same word-making instinct at work in real time.

Words for home, bed and everyday life

Internest (internet + nest) is the cosy cocoon of pillows and blankets you build around yourself for a long session online. It captures a very modern habit: the laptop in bed, the phone within reach, the outside world on pause. Part of the charm is that “nest” already suggests comfort and hiding away.

Chairdrobe (chair + wardrobe) is the chair that has slowly become a place to store clothes. Almost everyone has one, which is why the word spreads so easily. Its cousin, “floordrobe”, describes the same habit one level lower.

Bedgasm (bed + orgasm) is the wave of pleasure when you finally climb into bed after a very long day. The cheeky second half does the work: it exaggerates a simple comfort into something ecstatic. Few words on this list describe a more universal feeling.

Carcolepsy (car + narcolepsy) names the passenger who falls asleep as soon as the car is moving. Narcolepsy itself is a real and serious neurological sleep disorder, so this is a playful exaggeration. Drowsiness during travel is common, though: steady motion, engine hum and having nothing to do make many passengers sleepy.

Destinesia (destination + amnesia) is arriving somewhere and forgetting why you went. The experience is so common that psychologists have studied it: Gabriel Radvansky and colleagues at the University of Notre Dame reported in 2011 that walking through a doorway seems to make people more likely to forget what they meant to do, perhaps because the brain files memories by “event” and a new room marks a new one.

Nomonym (a play on “nom”, internet slang for eating, and words like homonym or synonym) is a food that tastes like another food. Think of every exotic meat described as “tasting like chicken”, or the many fruits compared with pear. It is a small, gentle word for a very common description.

Words for phones, texts and keyboards

Cellfish (cell phone + selfish) describes someone who keeps talking on their phone even when it is rude to the people around them. The blend is neat because “cell” and “sel” sound identical, so the word reads as “selfish” on first glance and only then reveals the phone.

Textpectation (text + expectation) is the anticipation of waiting for a reply to a message. Messaging apps that show when something has been read, or when the other person is typing, have arguably made this feeling stronger. Anyone who has stared at a screen after sending something important will recognise it.

Unkeyboardinated (keyboard + uncoordinated) means unable to type without constant mistakes. It is one of the longer blends here, and it works because the whole of “keyboard” fits almost perfectly into the sound of “uncoordinated”. Autocorrect, of course, often makes things worse.

Words for friends, dates and social life

Dudevorce (dude + divorce) is the official end of a close friendship between two men. The joke borrows the weight of a marriage ending and applies it to a friendship, which says something true: losing a long-time friend can hurt as much as a break-up, even if there is no paperwork.

Hiberdating (hibernate + dating) is what happens when someone starts a relationship and disappears from their friends’ lives. The image of hibernation, a long winter retreat, fits well. Most people have been on one side of this or the other.

Masturdating (a pun on a ruder word + dating) means taking yourself out alone to a film or a restaurant. Going solo has become far more common and less awkward than it once was, and many people find it relaxing. The word is a joke, but the habit is a healthy one.

Doppelbanger (doppelganger + banger) is someone who sleeps with a partner who looks uncannily like them, without being related. It plays on doppelganger, the German word for a double. Studies have found that couples are often somewhat alike in looks, which may be why the joke rings a bell.

Nonversation (non + conversation) is talk that goes nowhere, such as empty small talk. Small talk gets a bad name, yet it often does quiet work, easing strangers towards trust, so a nonversation is not always wasted. The word is still useful for the ones that truly are.

Afterclap (after + clap) is the lonely last clap after everyone else has stopped applauding. Interestingly, “afterclap” already exists in standard dictionaries with a different meaning: an unexpected, usually unwelcome consequence that comes after something seemed finished. The slang sense is a pun on that older word.

Beerboarding (beer + waterboarding) means getting a colleague drunk to extract secrets. The word borrows from a real interrogation technique, which gives it an edge, and it pokes fun at office gossip after work. Its humour depends on the gap between a pub evening and the serious practice it echoes.

Nerdjacking (nerd + hijacking) is taking over a conversation with far too much detail about your own passion. Whether the topic is trains, sourdough or a video game, most of us are guilty at some point. A good test is whether the other person is asking questions or just nodding.

Words for know-it-alls and bad ideas

Errorist (error + terrorist) is someone who keeps making mistakes, or who is almost always wrong. Like “askhole”, it changes one sound in a familiar word to make a new one. It is meant affectionately more often than not.

Ambitchous (ambitious + a rude word for an unpleasant woman) means trying to be meaner than the average person. It is the crudest blend in the set, built by dropping a swear word into the middle of a compliment. The card is blurred for its language.

Unlightening (un + enlightening) is learning something that leaves you knowing less, or at least feeling dumber. Plenty of online content fits the description. The word reverses “enlightening” in a way that feels instantly natural, which is why it reads like a real dictionary entry.

Epiphanot (epiphany + not) is an idea that feels brilliant in the moment and turns out to be pointless, ordinary or wrong. It is familiar to anyone who has written down a “genius” thought at 3am and read it again the next morning. The blend’s ending turns the excitement of an epiphany into an anticlimax.

Youniverse (you + universe) describes a person whose world contains only themselves. It is a neat way of saying someone is self-absorbed without using a harsher label. The blend works in writing better than in speech, because it sounds almost the same as “universe”.

Columbusing (from Christopher Columbus) means claiming to have discovered something that other people have known about for years or centuries, such as a dish, a style of music or a neighbourhood. The name points to Columbus’s 1492 landing in the Americas, lands already home to millions of people, which is still often described as a “discovery”. The card’s definition focuses on white people doing the discovering, which reflects how the term is usually used in debates about cultural appropriation.

Where these words come from, and whether they will last

Urban Dictionary was launched in 1999 by Aaron Peckham, then a first-year student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California, as a parody of traditional dictionaries. Anyone can submit a definition, and volunteer editors vote on whether to publish it. The site passed seven million definitions in 2014 and twelve million by 2020. That openness makes it a fast, honest record of how people actually talk, and linguists use it to trace slang. It also means the site is full of jokes, one-off inventions and plenty of crude or offensive entries, so it is not a reliable guide on its own.

Very few blends cross over into everyday use. The ones that survive usually name something people encounter often and have no tidy word for, which is why brunch and smog made it. From this list, “chairdrobe”, “textpectation” and “destinesia” have the best chance, simply because the experiences are so universal.

If you want to try making your own, pick two words that share a sound at the point where they meet, keep the result short enough to say easily, and make sure both halves are recognisable. Then use it once in conversation and see if anyone asks what it means.

Sources: Wikipedia: Portmanteau; Wikipedia: Blend word; Wikipedia: Urban Dictionary. Words and definitions from Urban Dictionary contributors; picture cards via Demilked and Expanded Consciousness.

Related:

• 16 cool words you didn't know
• 6 Reasons Science Says you Should Read a Book
• 7 Books That Will Radically Shift Your Perspectives
• Ten Books From a Personal Reading List
• An Archive Reading List of Inspirational Books
• 10 Benefits of Reading: Why You Should Read Every Day
• Why You Should Consider Dating A Girl Who Reads
• 14 reasons to read daily
• 13 ways to improve your studying process
• How I Learned to Read 300 Percent Faster in 20 Minutes
• The 10 Most Famous Personalities Of The Last 6,000 Years
• Top 14 Greatest Philosophers And Their Books
• 12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself Online For Free
• An Archive of Online Language-Learning Resources
• List of 40 FREE Educational Websites
• An Archive Directory of Websites for Learning New Skills
• Free books: 100 legal sites to download literature
• 135 Self-Education Resources For Lifelong Learners
• 300+ Mind Expanding Documentaries
• Work Less and Do More by Applying the Pareto Principle to Your Task List