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Show HN: WerdMerge: A Portmanteau Generator With Phonemes

werdmerge.com

71 pointshandler31 comments

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.

psh whatever

jk, i added it, per your request ;)

You should change the button from "merge" to....something else. "Go" "See results" heck, even "submit" would be better.

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).

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?

Seems like you'd want to match words that begin and end in weak syllables, e.g. Beethoven + veneer = Beethoveneer (overwrought, superficially emotional music).

You can also pair strong syllables: sorbet + Bayes = Sorbayes (dessert ordered on the condition that real ice cream is unavailable).

But putting a weak last with a strong first wrong-foots you: Beethovunforgiven.

EDIT: in case it sounds like I'm nitpicking, I love this.

the hardest part about this site for me was finding a good dictionary of words->phonemes... unfortunately what i found did not come with emphasis. if you want to try to find a better dictionary for me i'd check it out. good luck though with the way google's search is these days ;?j

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Thesaurus#Pronunciator ? I had a similar idea a while back, using this as a resource, but no time to do it :)

Carnegie-Mellon's phonetic dictionary provides vowel stresses, which may get you closer to where you want to be

i made this to brainstorm domain names

This is a great idea. I like the name, too.

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

you put in a word, and then it finds words that overlap phonetically in the front and in the back (left and right side of the page)...

my confusion i think stems from the fact that it looks like the results (with the star above) on the bottom happen when i was hitting the merge button (with two words in the box). when in fact the results are not the seemingly random one at the bottom.

yeah some of my (techy) friends didn't get that you should just type in a single word.

simple solution to this would be gray text in the empty field: "type a word" or something like that.

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: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/coli.2010.36... . The first author, Paul Cook, did a dissertation on them.

haha disobeethoven and laundromatrimony!

so the stars favorite things / make them show up at bottom?

I got computerus...

you got it

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

clicking a star votes for a combination. top voted combinations show up at the bottom of the page.

showing how a merge would be spelled is a pretty tough problem. if anyone had any clever ideas about this, i'd love to hear it.

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.

This is super cool, though.

Was 'wordmanteau' already taken?

Yeah 'word' does seem preferable to 'werd'.

> whois wordmanteau.com No match for "WORDMANTEAU.COM".

Except no one knows how to spell portmanteau or its derivatives.

wordmanteau is clearly wrong

Fun - it really brings out my juvenile side:

We denydealized a few crapplicants for bonership.

those are all great domain names!

dominosebleed

be careful with your phrasing i'm semanticklish. you can't be such a cavalyricist.

Slightly disappointed that entering "hardcore" didn't bring up favourites like "bardcore" or "wizardcore".

Still, pretty great!

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