Neologisms: Find half-and-half words

Gain inspiration for portmanteau from WordSpy

Tracy Ousdahl and Paul Pinney have traveled the globe. But sometimes, instead of venturing out to a cool destination, they use their time off to visit their families.

Don’t call that a vacation, though. To Tracy and Paul, that’s a famcation.

Half-and-half words like famcation — linguists call these portmanteaus — not only grab readers’ attention. They also move further and faster on social media. In fact, research by HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella shows that tweets containing novel words tend to get retweeted more often than those that don’t.

Get inspired by WordSpy.

Here are 10 novel words that have surprised and delighted me lately, from one of my favorite blogs, WordSpy:

Calligraffiti n. Graffiti that uses or is inspired by calligraphic letterforms and techniques.

Fauxductivity n. Pretending to work hard; busyness that consists of trivial or unproductive activities.

Halfalogue n. One side of a two-person conversation.

Phubbing pp. Snubbing another person by using your smartphone instead of interacting with that person.

Shampaign n. A fake, insincere, or misleading campaign, particularly for political office.

Then there’s fake-ation: n. a vacation where you spend most of your time reading email and performing other work-related tasks.

And BuzzWhack offers “oblication: Vacation time spent managing personal obligations, such as taking time off from work to move your son into his dorm at college.”

Tracy and Paul would be proud.

What’s your favorite portmanteau? Please share it in the comments below and let us know whether you wrote it yourself or found it yourself.