A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

 What do you call it when you have a tofurkey and a mocktail for brunch? Yes, that would be an odd meal*, but here we’re talking about binging on blends. Blend words, to be precise. You’d be feasting on tofurkey (tofu + turkey), brunch (breakfast + lunch), and a mocktail (mock + cocktail). And don’t even think of using a spork (spoon + fork) there. Or a chork.

 Blend words are words coined by fusing two or more words. They are also known as portmanteau words, from French portmanteau, a suitcase that opens into two halves. These words are not limited to food. This week we’ll see five such blend words.

*Better to eat that odd meal than be hangry (hungry + angry).


lunkhead

PRONUNCIATION:

(LUNGK-hed) 

MEANING:

noun: A dull or slow-witted person.

ETYMOLOGY:

From lunk (a blend of lump + hunk) + head. Earliest documented use: 1884.

USAGE:

"[Rugby] is about more than 30 lunkheads beating seven kinds of nonsense out of each other.”
 Stuart Jeffries; Sex, Violence, Class, Power, Politics -- the School Rugby Row Has it All; The Guardian (London, UK); Mar 5, 2016.

 See more usage examples of lunkhead in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.