
A portmanteau of every word in English (2015) - luu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/portmantout/
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dwrensha
This problem is more tractable than you might think! Some progress on it was
printed in the 2016 and 2017 Sigbovik proceedings:

[http://sigbovik.org/2016/proceedings.pdf](http://sigbovik.org/2016/proceedings.pdf)
[http://sigbovik.org/2017/proceedings.pdf](http://sigbovik.org/2017/proceedings.pdf)

If this kind of problem appeals to you, please consider participating in
[http://golf.horse/](http://golf.horse/), a tangentially related challenge
that is probably going to tie into Sigbovik 2019.

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fizwhiz
Can't believe I hadn't heard of SIGBOVIK before. Thanks for the share!

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tome
I'm pretty sure that's not what a portmanteu is.

"A portmanteau ... [is] parts of multiple words ... combined into a new word
as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog or motel, from motor and hotel"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau)

In particular a portmanteau need not contain the original words as substrings.

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mcv
Yeah, it's certainly a fun exercise, but it's not exactly what a portmanteau
is. There's probably a better word for this, and if not, this creator is
certainly entitled to invent a new one.

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jgtrosh
I find “portemantout” doesn't roll off the tongue. Instead, something like
“portemantotal” would sound better.

Also, the defining characteristic of the problem that the words overlap is
just not used for portemanteaux. For example: « porte » and « manteau » don't
overlap in « portemanteau ». It's still a very nice problem!

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JadeNB
> I find “portemantout” doesn't roll off the tongue. Instead, something like
> “portemantotal” would sound better.

But 'porte' and 'manteau' are French, so it makes sense to try to work in
'tout' rather than 'total'.

Also, 'portmantout' (not, I think, 'portemantout', since the original is
'portmanteau') involves only one change in vowel sound, right, not any major
shift in pronunciation?

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Fishkins
> Also, 'portmantout' (not, I think, 'portemantout', since the original is
> 'portmanteau') involves only one change in vowel sound, right, not any major
> shift in pronunciation?

Right on both counts. "Porte" means "door", "port" means "to carry/wear". The
latter is the word used in "portmanteau". I also agree "portmantout" sounds
nice, and very similar to "portmanteau".

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JadeNB
> "Porte" means "door", "port" means "to carry/wear".

Thanks for the polite correction. (I said 'porte' when dissecting the word in
my original post, even though I did get the word 'portmanteau' as a whole
correct.)

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jgtrosh
Porte means wear/carry as a verb in the imperative form or singular indicative
forms; it can also mean a door, probably for weird etymological reasons. In
the case of porte-manteau it absolutely means carry. I don't know if this
common kind of construction in French is technically supposed to be built from
the imperative or indicative, which would alternate the way of building a
corresponding construct in English. If it's the imperative, such constructs
(garde-manger, promène-couillon, tire-au-flanc, lèche-vitrine, mange-mort)
would be written like carry-all (you'd have keep-food, lick-window, eat-dead).
If it's the indicative, and in particular the 3rd person (he/she/one), as in «
[l'objet qui] porte [des] manteaux », then a corresponding English construct
would be carries-all, keeps-food, … which just sounds very weird in English. I
don't know what the official underlying grammatical construct is, but just
trying to kind of keep the French construct while changing it slightly seems
completely out of place.

Furthermore, nowhere does the idea of porte-manteau carry any meaning as to
the exercice of the original post which looks for partially-overlapping words.

Edit:

That last paragraph of mine is just wrong. I just read Wikipedia and indeed
the English word actually contains the ideas of overlap/truncation. That comes
from the redefining of portemanteau (as a coat hanger, or the original term of
the person carrying a coat) into a suitcase that splits in two equal parts. I
just always assumed it described the way porte and manteau were stuck together
(in which there's no overlap/truncation), instead of the suitcase meaning.

* I still maintain there's just no reason for the English word to have been bastardized into portmanteau.

* Also the fact that portmanteau/portemanteau is used to describe words being combined in a different way to how porte and manteau are combined just seems needlessly confusing.

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dools
"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, it's the most amazing word I've ever seen" \--
Big Bird

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Phemist
Shouldn't we be able to find even shorter ones and do some interesting bounds
calculation on it, given the recent progress on supercycles?

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sunstone
Wasn't that Finnegan's Wake? :)

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eesmith
Finnigans's Wake:
Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfalltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled

Arbitrary line from this work:
shvilleinagelessnessextilestrawierratasselingarretsinastylelessquadronedistensibilitiesprawlingubernativelyeah

I ... struggle to figure out which is more readable.

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benj111
What does it say, that I managed to pick out the word cheese?

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Double_a_92
"pizza" here. We are probably just hungry :D

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foxhop
I built something similar to cheat / win at "hanging with friends".

To see how easy it is to work with words, check out
[https://words.gumyum.com/](https://words.gumyum.com/) (source code included)

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netgusto
I managed to find autotomy, not in the list!
[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/autotomy](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/autotomy)

cryptozoology also.

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0xdada
Looks like those two are not on the wordlist used.

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Nerdfest
This is somewhat useful. As an example, if I ever open a business, it will
probably be called "greenbackspaceshipsychophysicshop"

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chime
That was great. Wonder if he can shorten it slightly by combining the
unextendable portmanteaus based on the shortest words needed to join them. And
also avoid choosing 'q' to randomly start words and increase chances of 'y'
when starting words.

Also TIL about [http://sigbovik.org/](http://sigbovik.org/).

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benj111
Yes I was thinking it would be interesting compression problem.

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bryanrasmussen
what is the purpose of this? A portmanteau stuffs meanings into it creating a
new meaning, to do this the meanings must have something that the brain can
find complementary. I think a portmanteau of everything meaning is essentially
meaningless. And as such, a worthless piece of baggage.

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jamesb93
It's a self made problem that was solved in an interesting way. Of course
noone is going to use a portmanteau of every word ever, but if everything was
done out of pure utility everything would be a bit stale...no?

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scrumper
Yep it’s not without use: it’s potentially a good source of prog-ish album
titles.

It’s art and there’s a lot that’s interesting in the technique.

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3chelon
Happy to have found "antidisestablishmentarianism" in there!

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Raphmedia
> it's called a "portmantout", since "tout" means "all" in French.

Oh wow, that's so wrong. A portemanteau is a "coat hanger" in english. The
word itself is a portemanteau but it's also an image for something that holds
a bunch of stuff together. So a word that holds words together is a
portemanteau.

Edit: Oh, I read it incorrectly. The author is aware of the correct word and
"portmantout" is another word he came up with.

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seymour333
Mark my words, someone is going to memorize the entire thing and use it as a
party trick.

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Aardwolf
What is the wordlist source?

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ouid
a link is given on the page

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sbhn
I couldnt find pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

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posterboy
Every other ' _-o-_ ' in there is a conjunction like variants of 'of', so
calling that monstrocity a word calls for a stretch of the imagination. That'd
be like, I don't know, calling composed emoji a character, or a programm a
function because you call main.

At the very least I wonder why there's no space after " _scopic_ ".

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sbhn
That word is in the oxford dictionary

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posterboy
There are phrases and collocations in the OED.

