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A portmanteau of every word in English (2015)
- sunstone 8y agoWasn't that Finnegan's Wake? :)
- eesmith 8y agoFinnigans's Wake: Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfalltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled Arbitrary line from this work: shvilleinagelessnessextilestrawierratasselingarretsinastylelessquadronedistensibilitiesprawlingubernativelyeah I ... struggle to figure out which is more readable.
- benj111 8y agoWhat does it say, that I managed to pick out the word cheese?
- Double_a_92 8y ago"pizza" here. We are probably just hungry :D
- chime 8y agoThat 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/.
- benj111 8y agoYes I was thinking it would be interesting compression problem.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agowhat 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.
- jamesb93 8y agoIt'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?
- scrumper 8y agoYep 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.
- seanhandley 8y agoAs Oscar Wilde said, "All art is useless".
- dools 8y ago"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, it's the most amazing word I've ever seen" -- Big Bird
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- netgusto 8y agoI managed to find autotomy, not in the list! https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/autotomy https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/autotomy cryptozoology also.
- 0xdada 8y agoLooks like those two are not on the wordlist used.
- Phemist 8y agoShouldn't we be able to find even shorter ones and do some interesting bounds calculation on it, given the recent progress on supercycles?
- foxhop 8y agoI 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)
- sbhn 8y agoI couldnt find pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
- posterboy 8y agoEvery 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".
- 3chelon 8y agoHappy to have found "antidisestablishmentarianism" in there!
- dwrensha 8y agoThis 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.
- fizwhiz 8y agoCan't believe I hadn't heard of SIGBOVIK before. Thanks for the share!
- Raphmedia 8y ago> 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.
- jgtrosh 8y agoI 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!
- JadeNB 8y ago> 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?
- Fishkins 8y ago> 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".
- JadeNB 8y ago> "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.)
- jgtrosh 8y agoPorte 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.
- Aardwolf 8y agoWhat is the wordlist source?
- ouid 8y agoa link is given on the page
- tome 8y agoI'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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mcv 8y agoYeah, 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.
- seymour333 8y agoMark my words, someone is going to memorize the entire thing and use it as a party trick.
- Nerdfest 8y agoThis is somewhat useful. As an example, if I ever open a business, it will probably be called "greenbackspaceshipsychophysicshop"