Blend Word

Today, I learned the English word snarf, meaning “to eat or drink quickly or greedily”. The Wiktionary arguably says that this may be formed by combining two English words snort and scarf. Aside from whether this is correct or not, it reminds me of another word snark, which is the combination of snide and remark (which is the definition of snark).

These words are generally called “blend word”. In the Wikipedia, there are many examples of blend words. Most of them look odd in form so that we can kind of guess that they are probably blend words or something. However, some of them do not really look like a blend word, so it is worth mentioning some of them here: smog, bit, and chortle.

I did not explicitly know that the word smog is the blend of smoke and fog, which makes perfect sense. The word bit is considered as binary unit or binary digit.

Chortle is a pretty common English word, and one definition of this word is “to laugh in a breathy way”. This meaning is totally understandable because chortle is the blend of chuckle(to laugh quietly) and snort(make a sudden sound through one’s nose).

Both snark and chortle are coined by an English writer Lewis Carroll. I couldn’t find a good source for a list of words he invented, but here is one source (not exhaustive though). How about that?