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French does that too so I think an invasion would not have helped.


in English, we refer to smashed-together word(s) as "portmanteau", a French word that is a portmanteau itself


The sort of compound words which we're discussing appear by a process of synthesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language

See also: agglutination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination

A portmanteau is different, where parts of several words are blended, rather than retaining the substance of each word in a compound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_word

And let's not forget xkcd's coinage of the malamanteau:

https://xkcd.com/739/




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