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Assuming "phreak" is a portmanteau of "phone" and "freak," giving us the term "phreaking" to describe the illicit act of hacking telephone networks, and "Phishing" pays homage to it by misspelling "fishing" to describe the practice of tricking someone into revealing sensitive information on computer networks, now we have "Vishing" (voice call phishing), "Smishing" (SMS text message phishing), and "Qishing" (QR code phishing) being used in the security industry.

Is there a better term (besides "annoying") than "jargon" to describe these words?

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  • 2
    What's wrong with jargon?
    – Lambie
    Oct 3 at 17:08
  • 1
    All neologisms.
    – Yosef Baskin
    Oct 3 at 17:31
  • Agree they are jargon and neologisms. Looking for more specific term to describe the deliberate misspelling to convey additional meaning.
    – koffkah
    Oct 3 at 17:40
  • I don't think there's a word for that. Maybe the folks in Linguistics would know.
    – Barmar
    Oct 3 at 20:01
  • How about "slanguishing"?
    – Sven Yargs
    Nov 3 at 0:41

1 Answer 1

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Blends combine lexemes to form a new word.

For example:

  • Chindia is a blend of China and India,
  • Obamacon a blend of Obama and conservative,
  • celeblog a blend of celebrity and blog,
  • groceraunt a blend of grocer and restaurant,
  • vegelate a blend of vegetable and chocolate,

Such compound neologisms are often buzzwords.

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  • 3
    Is there a difference between blend and portmanteau?
    – Barmar
    Oct 3 at 20:43
  • @Barmar : 'Portmanteau' vs. 'Blend' They're both about smashing words together to make new ones. "Blends", as they're called, are produced by combining other words or parts of words, like brunch from breakfast and lunch. Hold on, some of you are saying, don't you mean "portmanteau"? Well, yes. Portmanteau works too, but it's not the term that's been typically employed by lexicographers and linguists.
    – Graffito
    Oct 3 at 21:14

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