Portmanteau

Synonyms:	Name Smoosh, Smushname, Fansmush
See also:	Pairing Name
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A portmanteau (or portmanteau word) is created when two words or names are combined (or "smooshed") to form a new word.

It is used for ship names in many fandoms, like Smallville, Sherlock and Popslash.

For example, Justin Timberlake/Chris Kirkpatrick becomes Timbertrick, and Clark/Lex becomes Clex, while the pairing of Chloe Sullivan and Lex Luthor, in contrast, was known as Chlex. No particular convention other than euphony regulates how the names are combined.

Well, okay, euphony and hilarity. Some portmanteaus are intentionally funny, such as "Pepperony" for Iron Man pairing Pepper/Tony. Likewise, Minim_Calibre coined the name-squish "Spred" for Spike/Fred on Angel, and dubbed her archive for same "The Buttery," thus demonstrating that name-smooshes are mocked as often as they are found in ordinary use.

In rarer cases, a portmanteau may also include words other than the names of two characters, for example "Wincest" in the Supernatural fandom. The name combines "Winchester" with "incest" to refer to shipping the Winchester brothers together.

The practice almost almost means a romantic or intimate relationship, but not necessarily always! An early example of this is "Chesterbelloc," a phrase coined by George Bernard Shaw in 1918 to describe the combined influence of two writers, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

A canon example for a portmanteau word is the title of the Norwegian TV show Beforeigners which is a combination of the terms before and foreigners.

Origin

Popslash is credited with popularizing the smushname as pairing name. It spread to other fandoms (Buffy, Smallville, Harry Potter, etc.), though only in the age of Tumblr has the smushname taken over completely.

A fan in 2004 said: "Buffy is, as always, a prime suspect I've been seeing "Spuffy" and "Xandrew" and "Spander" for at least 3 years."

As pet peeve

Fans are divided on the use of smooshed pairing names. Some have fun coming up with them and like the shorthand, while others find them grating. Portmanteaus can lead to silly or unfortunate creations like Spirk and Kock, for Kirk/Spock.

Many other terms in fandom are actually portmanteaus, such as drawble for "drawing drabble", or fanon for "fannish canon", but when a fan says they hate portmanteaus, they generally only mean the infamous portmanteaus-as-pairing-names.

In East Asian Fandoms

The order of the names smushed often indicates who tops/bottoms in the relationship, more so for same-sex relationships. This is not only reflective of sexual dynamics but also extends to the psychological aspects of the relationship; the top (left/beginning name) is traditionally understood to be the one who is more active in the relationship, while the bottom (right/ending name) more passive (the specific determiners/traits of which vary greatly by personal standards and preferences). Since the 2010s, many Western fans have considered this an arbitrary and outdated practice. Nevertheless, it (ordering of the name indicating top/bottom) remains the case with fans in the East, and differing perspectives on its application more often than not cause misunderstandings in communication that may upset either party on social media or fanwork platforms.

Due to the fact that ship names are separated by the sexual as well as the social dynamics within the relationship, despite being based on the pairing of the same two characters, ship names of opposite orders are virtually universally seen as two distinct ships by East Asian shippers, as fan works depicting the reflected psychological interpretations of the characters tend to differ greatly (and, even without referring to fan works, the naming itself is seen to be reflective of one's deeper understandings of the characters); thus ship wars within East Asian circles often stem from this difference, in addition to pairings with different characters.

This association has become so prominent among East Asian shippers, instead of using “top/bottom” to refer to parties of a ship, “left/right” is also commonly chosen to describe the parties in their broader relationship dynamics.

In Japanese Fandoms

Ships in Japanese fandoms are generally smooshed, though such combinations generally follow more of a set pattern than in Western fandom. Written Japanese uses morae (syllables) rather than individual letters, and it is common in Japanese to create portmanteaus (or abbreviate words) by reducing longer phrases to three or four syllables. Pairing names follow the same linguistic rules; therefore, Japanese-fandom pairing names are generally four syllables, two each from the beginning of each name. For example, Inui x Kaidou becomes InuKai and Tezuka x Ryouma becomes TezuRyo(u) (the final u is often omitted in romanisation). Unlike in Western fandoms, such pairing names are usually written with each half capitalized, e.g. Sasuke x Naruto is SasuNaru, rather than Sasunaru.

As the majority of English-speaking Japanese-canon fans do not know Japanese, they may use this naming style without fully understanding the rules behind it. Thus the occasional appearance of pairing smooshes more akin to Western styles, that don't conform to the rules of Japanese, such as Tai(chi)/Sora, a popular het pairing in Digimon; this is often written in English-language fandom as Taiora, a combination that is impossible in Japanese.

As aforementioned, the order of names in a smoosh for a Japanese fandom indicates who tops/bottoms in the relationship, with the top's name being first and the bottom's being second; for example, SasuNaru would have top!Sasuke and bottom!Naruto, while NaruSasu would have top!Naruto and bottom!Sasuke (and SasuNaruSasu or NaruSasuNaru implies either a switch relationship or a relationship with undefined sexual positions, where the interpretation that comes with the first bi-gram tends to be more dominant than that of the second). A switch relationship is indicated by the label リバ (riba, from "reversible").

In rare cases where the ship name is not a portmanteau, nicknames reflecting characteristics of the relationship may be used instead. For example, in the Hetalia: Axis Powers fandom, as a result of political sensitivity with portmanteaus being the same as actual combinations of country names used in the real world, fans have resorted to using labels of コンビ (konbi, from "combination") to refer to both platonic and romantic relationships, such as お花夫婦 ("flower couple") for Germany and Italy.

In some other cases, words reflecting character traits will be substituted for the names while maintaining the portmanteau format. In the Johnny's Entertainment fandom, where the involved are real-life idols, in order to handle sensitivities surrounding RPF, both コンビ labels and substitutions may be used. For example, for the shipping of Kōichi x Tsuyoshi Domoto of KinKi Kids, 車魚 (“car fish,” referring to their respective interests) is commonly used instead of the formal portmanteau 光剛 (kōtsuyo) in public online spaces; 赤青 (“red blue,” their representative colors) is another nickname. The コンビ label of FTR, short for 二人 (futari, “two people,” as they’re known as the first and most prominent duo in the company), is used for any fan content involving the two’s relationship, romantic or not.

In Chinese Fandoms

Smushnames are very common with Chinese pairing names, usually by pairing a distinctive character in one party's name with a character from the other. How characters are chosen is sometimes determined by their ability to disambiguate and sometimes the sounding; the order usually depends on which character is the top (left) and which is the bottom (right).

There is some ambiguity in the pairing names, as a pairing name might also simply indicate a close platonic or familial relationship. For example, in the QZGS fandom, 双叶 (shuāng yè, "double Ye") is used to tag Ye Qiu & Ye Xiu gen fics as well as incest. These works may also tag 年下 (“younger”) or 年上 (“older”); if it is tagged 年上, the top is older, and if it's tagged 年下, the top is younger. In general cases, 年上 and 年下 are not exclusive indicators for topping.

Similar to Japanese fandoms, in cases where the relationship status is interpreted to be ambiguous, many Chinese fandoms may also use labels involving traits of the relationship followed by 组 ("unit"). This may also be used for switch relationships/relationships that are undefined sexually, in addition to ABA/BAB sequences like the Japanese. However, for Chinese shippers, there are further distinctions in labeling versatile romantic relationships. 无差 ("no difference") generally refers to romantic interpretations that involve no sexual aspects at all (in which case the first bi-gram may still hold more weight in terms of the psychological dynamics of the characters) and is therefore open to any sexual interpretation in terms of the positions if one wishes, whereas 互攻 ("mutual topping") either exclusively refers to the physical act of switching or entails a sexual relationship where both parties would top.

On Tumblr

On fannish tumblrs, portmanteaus are widely used, such as #Cherik for Charles/Erik, or #CroWen for Cristina Yang/Owen Hunt; Tumblr does not support the "/" symbol in tags. Posts must be tagged in order to be widely seen, so portmanteaus are more of a necessity. The end result is that smushnames are ubiquitous in fandoms that started (or were rebooted) after Tumblr, but are less common or less dominant in older fandoms. Older fandoms that also have a presence on Tumblr are less likely to have smushnames.

Outside Fandom

In recent years, gossip magazines and blogs have picked up the trend, perhaps from Soap Opera fandom, and started giving real life celebrity supercouples their own pairing-smoosh names. Some examples would be Bennifer (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez), TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes), and Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie). The supercouple smoosh name trend became so prevalent that Stephen Colbert parodied it on The Colbert Report by citing his favorite celebrity pairing name, "Filliam H. Muffman" (Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy).

Further Reading/Meta

• On Pairing Names, ^{Archived version} by cereta (July 7, 2003)
• A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Shipping at The Toast
• "The Fandom Pairing Name: Blends and the Phonology-Orthography Interface" by Cara DiGirolamo, 2012