Etymology

portmanteau

port·man·teau
P3O1R1T1M3A1N1T1E1A1U1

Today it means: A large travelling case usually made of leather, and opening into two equal sections. Full definition →

Middle French portemantea ← Latin mantellum ← Old French porter
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The story

  1. Proto-Indo-European*per-
  2. Proto-Indo-European*pr̥téh₂
  3. Proto-Italic*portā
  4. Proto-Italic*portāō
  5. Latinportāre
  6. Old Frenchporter
  7. Middle Frenchporte
  8. Latinmantellum
  9. Middle Frenchmanteau
  10. Middle Frenchportemantea
  11. English todayportmanteau

From Middle French portemanteau (“coat stand”), from porte (“he carries”, third-person singular present indicative of porter (“to carry”)) + manteau (“coat”), literally “[that which] carries coat”. The lexical sense (sense 2) was first used figuratively by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) to describe the words he coined in the poem “Jabberwocky”, based on the concept of two words packed together, similar to a portmanteau (etymology). Sense 3 (“portmanteau film”) is derived from this.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.