A.Word.A.Day --lunkhead

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Apr 4, 2016

This week’s theme
Blend words

This week’s words
lunkhead
clairaudience
affluential
bankster
sheeple

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

What do you call it when you have a tofurkey and a mocktail for brunch? Yes, that would be an odd meal^*, but here we’re talking about binging on blends. Blend words, to be precise. You’d be feasting on tofurkey (tofu + turkey), brunch (breakfast + lunch), and a mocktail (mock + cocktail). And don’t even think of using a spork (spoon + fork) there. Or a chork.

Blend words are words coined by fusing two or more words. They are also known as portmanteau words, from French portmanteau, a suitcase that opens into two halves. These words are not limited to food. This week we’ll see five such blend words.

^*Better to eat that odd meal than be hangry (hungry + angry).

lunkhead

PRONUNCIATION:

(LUNGK-hed)

MEANING:

noun: A dull or slow-witted person.

ETYMOLOGY:

From lunk (a blend of lump + hunk) + head. Earliest documented use: 1884.

USAGE:

“[Rugby] is about more than 30 lunkheads beating seven kinds of nonsense out of each other.”
Stuart Jeffries; Sex, Violence, Class, Power, Politics -- the School Rugby Row Has it All; The Guardian (London, UK); Mar 5, 2016.

See more usage examples of lunkhead in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color. -Maya Angelou, poet (4 Apr 1928-2014)

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