High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A portmanteau is used broadly to mean a blend of two (or more) words or morphemes and their meanings into one new word, and narrowly in linguistics fields to mean only a blend of two or more function words. "Portmanteau word" is used to describe a linguistic blend, namely "a word formed by blending sounds from two or more distinct words and combining their meanings." Such a definition of "portmanteau word" overlaps with the grammatical term contraction. Linguists avoid using the latter term in such cases. As an example, the words do and not become the contraction don't, a single word that represents the meaning of the combined words.