: Tips for Coming Up with a Good Portmanteau (Name Smush) In advance of the recent blizzard which struck the East Coast of the U.S., many media outlets were trying to coin a catchy name to

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Here are some of the qualities I came up with:

Flow. The two words have to flow together smoothly. Brangelina is an easy combination of Brad and Angelina. It helps when the two words share letters or sounds.

Syllables. Swapping out the same number of syllables keeps the rhythm of the original word. This is why Snowmageddon works. Snowpocalypse has the same syllables but less flow because there's a slight pause where the two consonants come together.

Spelling. The written version of flow. You have to be able to spell it easily and intuitively, or people won't want to share it. Bennifer works really well; while BeyonZ has flow, you have to think about how to write it so the names are recognizable.

Recognizable parts. It's easy to pick out "John" and "Sherlock" in Johnlock or "drama" and "comedy" in dramedy.

New recognizable entity. Obviously there's no such thing as a Sharktopus, but you know exactly what that word is trying to describe. A mockumentary is a parody of a documentary. Brunch is the meal well after breakfast but too early for lunch.

Sound. It has to sound like a word. Jorts, a combination of "jeans" and "shorts," sounds weird and hasn't caught on. Spork is silly but workable. Motel has been around so long that you might not know it's a combination of "motor" and "hotel."

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I have no experience but here's what I came up with:

1: make it flow. In your examples above, Brangelina and Snowmageddon both flow much better than BeyonZ.

Make it catchy. Snowmageddon is very catchy. So is Bennifer. Blizzard2016 isn't catchy.
Make it relevant. Calling a snowstorm Jones had no relevancy towards the subject.
Keep it short. If someone were to call the blizzard "super-duper-snow-scare" it would have been too long to say easily. Blizzard2016 is also too long.
Creativity. I have personally never heard of "Snowmageddon" before, but it is very creative. Something like "blizzard2016" is just stating the obvious without any artistic flair.

I hope this helps a little with explaining the aspects of a good portmanteau

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It is not easy to pin down, but I will make a stab at a partial answer.

Firstly, people need to be able to recognise that it is made up from two separate words.

Secondly, they need to know who or what the two halves are. For example, I would never have worked out 'Bennifer' if you hadn't explained it.

The two halves need to clearly represent the phenomenon and complement each other.

The pairing must be seen as being clever and original. However, piggybacking on an already existing portmanteau is quite popular with words like 'Grexit' and 'Brexit'.

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