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Portmanteau Generator

220 points| gbear605 | 7 years ago |punchlinedesign.net | reply

63 comments

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[+] misnome|7 years ago|reply
I had my doubts going in, but:

"Pointless" "Meeting" -> Morondezvous

I think it just found the perfect word for my daily life.

[+] jahn716|7 years ago|reply
You've just added value to my life! I will use this word with great pleasure.
[+] ineptech|7 years ago|reply
Also: "programateurish" - might come in handy for code reviews?
[+] ar-nelson|7 years ago|reply
An excellent way to invent new Pokémon: element + animal

    "electric"+"rat":

    - dynamole
    - hydroach
    - electrodent
[+] ConceptJunkie|7 years ago|reply
Electrodent is perfect for Pikachu, but, unsurprisingly, much less appealing.
[+] sjwright|7 years ago|reply
This is cool. I entered Bird + Word and got:

  - beak speak
  - lexicon swan
  - ornithology terminology 
And to cap it off, the portmentau of spellican!
[+] binarymax|7 years ago|reply
The results are just incredible. The depth of the project is very deep. Case in point, chess+clock yields hourglasker (hourglass & Lasker). Lasker was a German chess champion, well known in chess circles but the average person would have no idea who he is.

I wonder if this is using wikipedia or dbpedia to walk a graph and find words to stick together. That's the only way I could think of doing this.

[+] ConceptJunkie|7 years ago|reply
That's really cool, but as I described above, my experience was different. The phoneme matching is really impressive but the word selection functionality seems pretty weak.

I had better luck with "large" and "cat" which gave me "colossalot", as in "colossal ocelot", which is a real winner.

However, I don't want to dismiss the hard work that went into this tool, despite my criticisms. It's very, very cool.

[+] yesenadam|7 years ago|reply
>Lasker was a German chess champion

That doesn't quite do him justice - Emanuel Lasker was world champion for 27 (!) years, 1894-1921, a record not likely ever to be surpassed. And a mathematician (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laskerian_ring ) and fine writer. In fact I learnt to play from Lasker's Manual of Chess. It's very poetic in places, e.g.

On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.

edit: I guess you knew that if you were trying chess + clock hehe.

[+] samcodes|7 years ago|reply
Well... Time to change careers. A "sex" and "travel" blog called "exploregasm" needs to exist.
[+] xref|7 years ago|reply
Seeding with “tiger mom” didn’t disappoint:

  - galigator (gal/alligator)
  - croctuplets (croc/octuplets)
  - Pumather-in-law (puma/mother-in-law)
[+] usdivad|7 years ago|reply
"existential" + "angst" yields some great results, including despairitual (despair/spiritual), tormentological (torment/ontological), and sartrevail (sartre/travail)
[+] headmelted|7 years ago|reply
Seeded it with fish and plane because they were the first two words I could think of.

"tarmackerel"

I am complete.

[+] TadaScientist|7 years ago|reply
Oh, I've got another one:

Britain and exit yields: Briturn - I think the signs have spoken

[+] emiliobumachar|7 years ago|reply
Very cool and impressive project. "portmanteau" + "website" yields "internetymology".
[+] onion2k|7 years ago|reply
Rockstar + Developer yields the rather delightful "insomniactor".
[+] flatfilefan|7 years ago|reply
In this friendustry informat is the mewsage.
[+] slig|7 years ago|reply
Suggestion: integrate this on a domain name suggestion service.
[+] EForEndeavour|7 years ago|reply
As far as I can tell, it already serves that purpose beautifully in its current state :P
[+] alexanderdmitri|7 years ago|reply
My favorite:

timid + programmer => softwary (software/wary)

[+] TadaScientist|7 years ago|reply
This is internet gold

spaghetti + mom yields:

grandpasta mommytball spagheteenager spagheteen fettuccineice

I think I found my next online nickname: "grandpasta flash"

[+] ggggtez|7 years ago|reply
A think the right way to test such a tool is to start with a list of known portmanteaus or rhymes, and check if the tool successfully finds them, and with what precision and recall.

Just having people plug in words and find things that they find interesting is going to result in people feeling it's better than it actually is. I tried a few examples, and while some of the outputs seemed "OK", they missed what seemed like obvious puns that I know exist in the lexicon because I was able to massage the inputs until it found them.

[+] ConceptJunkie|7 years ago|reply
I think the first step would be to use a tool for word selection that does a better job finding actual synonyms instead of "words that are vaguely the same".

The phoneme matching aspect of it obviously works very well. I think if you had more control over the words it would use, you'd get better results. See my comment about "politician" above. I've repeated tried combinations with the word politician in them, and none of the synonyms I would expect to show up ever showed up.

[+] ConceptJunkie|7 years ago|reply
This is a really cool implementation, and I'm impressed with the examples given.

So, I did what every obnoxious person would do and put in "stupid" and "politician", but I didn't get any real good results, mostly because it didn't use any of the synonyms for "politician" that I would expect... like president, senator, congressman, governor, prime minister (would it even deal with compound words?) or even the most obvious: politician!

Instead it used these words: moralist, orator, critic, rabbi, teacher, entrepreneur, philanthropist, leader (OK, that one is good), economist, attorney, prelate, administrator, constituent, assemblyman, and assemblywoman. Everyone of these was either not really a kind of politician, or a pretty obscure word.

Now some of these portmanteaus were pretty clever through the matching of phoneme clusters, and not just exact ones, but similar ones, and that's what's really cool about this tool, but ultimately I couldn't get what I was looking for!

At the very least it should use the words you entered!

Nevertheless, I definitely want to play with this more.

So, to the authors I'd say they've built something really cool and I'm looking forward to seeing how it can be improved.

[+] deegles|7 years ago|reply
I put in "software engineer" and got 'technologyologist'... which feels right!