Show HN: WerdMerge: A Portmanteau Generator With Phonemes

I was extremely confused at first because I put in two words in the input box, and clicking 'merge' would do nothing. When I see 'merge', I expect that it will somehow merge the two words I've entered. You should change that button or at least add some text so it's a little more obvious what's going on. Or maybe add some code to alert the user that only one word is expected if/when they enter two.

When I think of notable portmanteaus e.g. chortle, chillax they don't often fit with the formula of matching whole phonemes at the end of the first word and the beginning of the second (Chortle uses the first phoneme, the middle phoneme of word two, then back to word one to finish).<p>That said, the werdmerge discovered concept of a chillaxative made me chortle a bit.

If you're getting your phonemes from an IPA dictionary, couldn't you check for emphasis too?<p>Seems like you'd want to match words that begin and end in weak syllables, e.g. Beethoven + veneer = Beethoveneer (overwrought, superficially emotional music).<p>You can also pair strong syllables: sorbet + Bayes = Sorbayes (dessert ordered on the condition that real ice cream is unavailable).<p>But putting a weak last with a strong first wrong-foots you: Beethovunforgiven.<p>EDIT: in case it sounds like I'm nitpicking, I love this.

i made this to brainstorm domain names

this is cool but i'm not sure i get how the input affects the output? the results don't seem related.

There's a small, recent scholarly literature on this in computational linguistics, referring to these as "lexical blends". This journal article is the most prominent publication, I believe: <a href="http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/coli.2010.36.1.36104" rel="nofollow">http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/coli.2010.36...</a> . The first author, Paul Cook, did a dissertation on them.

haha disobeethoven and laundromatrimony!<p>so the stars favorite things / make them show up at bottom?

What exactly does clicking on the star do? Is there any way to get it to show how the merged word would be spelled?

You might consider adding a popup or a footer note that describes what the stars with exclamation points do. My guess is that they either report a profane word or bookmark a word combination, but I couldn't tell you for sure. Clicking on one didn't give me much either.

Using Opera 11 -- the text in the box doesn't auto-erase when I go to type something in.<p>This is super cool, though.

Was 'wordmanteau' already taken?

Fun - it really brings out my juvenile side:<p>We denydealized a few crapplicants for bonership.

dominosebleed

Slightly disappointed that entering "hardcore" didn't bring up favourites like "bardcore" or "wizardcore".<p>Still, pretty great!