What is it called when a speaker accidentally merges two words?

Question

There is a word to describe the action of accidentally mixing two words together, such as exclaiming trampede when struggling to explain what cattle do. The speaker tries to say one thing, but a related concept interferes right at the moment of speech, and as a result the two words come out as somewhat garbled together. Importantly, however, the garbled speech is understandable and not non-sensical. Referring to the above case, we all instantly see that cattle stampede, and as a result can trample what is in their path.

Several years ago I came across the precise word for this, and I cannot find it again. It is not portmanteau, as that's a word I have known all my life and thus I would not have been pleased to discover this new-- now forgotten-- word. The important distinction between portmanteau and the above concept is its accidental, incorrect nature.

P.S. I understand that technically the words I described might be portmanteaus, in the same sense that squares are rectangles. However, in the identical sense that a person might seek square as a better word to describe rectangles of equal side length, so I search for this.

Answer 1

In psycholinguistics, that might be referred to as a speech error — a “blend” of the unintentional type. For example:

Blend “errors” involve two different lexical units that are planned for the same slot in a phrase and their phonological forms blend together in a single unit:

(11) That’s a great big [fɑpɑ] bear! (father and papa) (Jaeger 2005)

This example from a child resulted in a blend of the words father and papa, two related lexical items planned for that position in the sentence.

_{Source: To “Err” is Human: The Nature of Phonological “Errors” in Language Development}

Portmanteaus are blends too, but they are intentional.

That’s the best I can do. But before I go, I thought I would offer a word I accidentally invented years ago — in a nomenclature meta moment:

termanalogy n.

1. An improvised word similar to the one you were aiming to say.

 

Answer 2

lexical/word blend errors

Word blend errors should be examined for evidence to support this hypothesis, but the facts in the MIT-CU corpus are obscured by the number of cases that blend at a shared phoneme (e.g., "prubble" for [problem + trouble]), making it impossible to determine whether the blended portions correspond to the initial consonant sequence and the rest of the word or not. Pyscholinguistics: Critical Concepts in Psychology ref.

In paradigmatic lexical blend errors, the most common semantic relationship for the adults was synonyms...The frequency of synonyms is what is expected, given the definition of lexical blends: if two lexical items are competing for the same slot in the utterance, then the most likely situation will be that the two words will convey nearly the same meaning. Kids' Slips ref.

While speech errors come in many forms... Semantic errors are of two types, word substitutions and word blends.
...
As discussed in 2.3.4, substitution and blend errors frequently involve words that are semantically related in a paradigmatic way. This leads many to the conclusion that the mapping errors involved here arise from the "proximity" of paradigmatically related words in a semantically organized lexicon. Semantic Relations and the Lexicon: Antonymy, Synonymy, and Other Paradigms (2003) ref

word blend errors is an index entry in this last ref.

Answer 3

I can't find the English word for this but I do know we have one in Dutch (my mother tongue). It's called contaminatie, which is a funny word, since it also carries the same meaning as the word contamination does. Two words contaminating one another, forming a mutually infected new one!

Contaminaties in everyday language can be divided into three categories:

1. a one-off slip of the tongue
2. established contaminaties (implemented over time)
3. deliberate mixtures

A contaminatie explicitly means the blending of words that carry a similar meaning orginally--like stampede and trample.

Answer 4

Perhaps the term you’re looking for is “Freudian Slip” which can encompass a “spoonerism”. You can find an online article here: https://www.healthline.com/health/freudian-slip

Answer 5

Could you possibly be thinking of the word Spoonerism? It doesn't an mean involuntary portmanteau, which is what you've described; it means switching consonants between two words, like saying plading traces instead of trading places.