Blendingsor Blends – words are combined from two words orsynonyms including the letters and sounds which are formed as common connectingelement.
This process of formation of a new word canbe also called telescoping, because the words seem to slide into one anotherlike of a telescope. In blends two ways of word-building are combined:abbreviation and composition.
Nowadays Blends are very numerousaltogether, they are very popular and becoming one of the productive ways offorming new words especially in terminology, mass media, trade advertisementsand internet.
Blendings today have become a trend andfamous slogans which have gained wide popularity in highly used websites andhave entered into the vocabularies of twitter users. Let’s look some of theterms: advertainment from(advertisement and entertainment), bit from(binary and digit), freeware from(free and software), pixel from(picture and element) etc.
Traditionally, to form a blend we clip theend of the fi rst component (apocope) and the beginning of the second component(aphaeresis). As a result we have a compound-shortened word. One of the firstblends in English was the word «smog»from two synonyms: smoke and fog which means smoke mixed with fog.From the first component the beginning is taken, from the second one the end,the vowel «o» is common for both of them.
Most blends are formed by one of thefollowing methods:
1. The beginning of one word is added tothe end of the other. For example, the word “brunch” is a meal you eat in the late morning that combines breakfast and lunch. Mostly blends are formed from a word-group, such as: acromania (acronym mania), dramedy (drama comedy), informecial (information commercial), magalog (magazine catalogue), sociolite (social elite), fanzine (fan magazine), motorcade (motor cavalcade). Theelements may be synonymous, belong to the same semantic field or at least bemembers of the same lexicogrammatical class of words: French and English саnhave the new form Frenglish.
The new word pleather appears in a result of mixing together the words (plasticand leather) having the new meaning as a plastic material that looks likeleather, for example, a pleather jacket.
2. The beginnings of two words arecombined. For example, cyborg is ablend of cybernetic and organism. el-hi is produced from (elementary and high schools).
At present day we can meet new forms ofblending, when the beginning of two different words can be joined togethergiving the new meanings.
The new edition of the Macmillan EnglishDictionary gives the new words building by means of blends: chicklit is combined from two words (chicken and literature) which is usedin informal speech with the meaning – (novels written for, about, or by youngeducated women); the new word uptalk meansthe tendency to make voice rise at the end of sentences so that statementssound like questions this blend is formed from two words (upper talking).
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionarybrings us the most up to date meanings of words created from different ones,e.g. the computer term Wi-fi is combined from (wireless fidelity) –broad band connections are not only in computer stores but in coffee shops,public libraries and bookstores, you can log into the Internet without physicallyplugging into anything.
The new blend hi-tech is formed and shortened from two words (high technology) and using the mostmodern methods and machines, especially electronic ones, e.g. hi-tech industries.
Two words are blended around a commonsequence of sounds. For example, the word motelis a blend of motor and hotel,the blend cinemadict iscombined from cinema and adict, the word faction is from fact and fiction (fi ction based on real facts).
