
Show HN: WerdMerge: A Portmanteau Generator With Phonemes - handler
http://www.werdmerge.com/
======
acabal
I was extremely confused at first because I put in two words in the input box,
and clicking 'merge' would do nothing. When I see 'merge', I expect that it
will somehow merge the two words I've entered. You should change that button
or at least add some text so it's a little more obvious what's going on. Or
maybe add some code to alert the user that only one word is expected if/when
they enter two.

~~~
handler
psh whatever

jk, i added it, per your request ;)

~~~
yarone
You should change the button from "merge" to....something else. "Go" "See
results" heck, even "submit" would be better.

------
danteembermage
When I think of notable portmanteaus e.g. chortle, chillax they don't often
fit with the formula of matching whole phonemes at the end of the first word
and the beginning of the second (Chortle uses the first phoneme, the middle
phoneme of word two, then back to word one to finish).

That said, the werdmerge discovered concept of a chillaxative made me chortle
a bit.

------
mnemonicsloth
If you're getting your phonemes from an IPA dictionary, couldn't you check for
emphasis too?

Seems like you'd want to match words that begin and end in weak syllables,
e.g. Beethoven + veneer = Beethoveneer (overwrought, superficially emotional
music).

You can also pair strong syllables: sorbet + Bayes = Sorbayes (dessert ordered
on the condition that real ice cream is unavailable).

But putting a weak last with a strong first wrong-foots you:
Beethovunforgiven.

EDIT: in case it sounds like I'm nitpicking, I love this.

~~~
handler
the hardest part about this site for me was finding a good dictionary of
words->phonemes... unfortunately what i found did not come with emphasis. if
you want to try to find a better dictionary for me i'd check it out. good luck
though with the way google's search is these days ;?j

~~~
humblest_ever
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Thesaurus#Pronunciator> ? I had a similar
idea a while back, using this as a resource, but no time to do it :)

------
handler
i made this to brainstorm domain names

~~~
albedoa
This is a great idea. I like the name, too.

------
meatsock
this is cool but i'm not sure i get how the input affects the output? the
results don't seem related.

~~~
handler
you put in a word, and then it finds words that overlap phonetically in the
front and in the back (left and right side of the page)...

~~~
meatsock
my confusion i think stems from the fact that it looks like the results (with
the star above) on the bottom happen when i was hitting the merge button (with
two words in the box). when in fact the results are not the seemingly random
one at the bottom.

------
syllogism
There's a small, recent scholarly literature on this in computational
linguistics, referring to these as "lexical blends". This journal article is
the most prominent publication, I believe:
[http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/coli.2010.36...](http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/coli.2010.36.1.36104)
. The first author, Paul Cook, did a dissertation on them.

------
kilovoltaire
haha disobeethoven and laundromatrimony!

so the stars favorite things / make them show up at bottom?

~~~
covercash
I got computerus...

------
Sniffnoy
What exactly does clicking on the star do? Is there any way to get it to show
how the merged word would be spelled?

~~~
handler
clicking a star votes for a combination. top voted combinations show up at the
bottom of the page.

showing how a merge would be spelled is a pretty tough problem. if anyone had
any clever ideas about this, i'd love to hear it.

------
Nycto
You might consider adding a popup or a footer note that describes what the
stars with exclamation points do. My guess is that they either report a
profane word or bookmark a word combination, but I couldn't tell you for sure.
Clicking on one didn't give me much either.

------
atgm
Using Opera 11 -- the text in the box doesn't auto-erase when I go to type
something in.

This is super cool, though.

------
slmbrhrt
Was 'wordmanteau' already taken?

~~~
kilovoltaire
Yeah 'word' does seem preferable to 'werd'.

> whois wordmanteau.com No match for "WORDMANTEAU.COM".

~~~
ComputerGuru
Except no one knows how to spell portmanteau or its derivatives.

------
klochner
Fun - it really brings out my juvenile side:

We denydealized a few crapplicants for bonership.

~~~
handler
those are all great domain names!

------
handler
dominosebleed

~~~
currycurry
be careful with your phrasing i'm semanticklish. you can't be such a
cavalyricist.

------
thristian
Slightly disappointed that entering "hardcore" didn't bring up favourites like
"bardcore" or "wizardcore".

Still, pretty great!

