“Well, slithy means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-glass, and What Alice Found There

When you’re learning a new vocabulary word, you’ll find it helpful to look up its etymology: the origin of the word, its roots in older languages, and the history of its development up until its modern usage. Many words change over time, and others hardly at all; it’s interesting to trace the evolution of English through its words. The word portmanteau has its origins in the royal courts of France in the Middle Ages, and comes from the French words porter (“to carry”) and manteau (“coat, cloak”). The person designated as the porte-manteau was the one who carried the king’s cloak. This gradually became a term used for the bag the cloak could be packed in, and by the 15th century that meaning for the word had reached England and become incorporated into the English language.

By that time, however, the use of portemanteau as the name for something in which to carry clothing fell out of use in France, to be replaced by the word valise, which originally referred to the satchel used by soldiers to carry goods or documents (the word satchel comes from either the Greek sakkos or the Latin saccus, both of which mean “sack, bag” – a satchel is a small sack). Once again, this word bounced across the Channel to become part of the English vocabulary in the 17th century. In the late 19th century, possibly due to the fact that people generally didn’t pack cloaks as often any more, the word suitcase started being used in English. The French continued to use valise, and in France a portemanteau is now a coat rack instead of a suitcase. While we think of the word luggage today as a modern word describing the suitcases full of clothing we take on vacations (assuming they catch the same airplane flight as we do, of course) it’s actually a word that’s around 500 years old, and has the rather self-explanatory meaning of “things you ‘lug’ around.”

Once you open up a word to see what information is packed inside, you never know where you’ll end up on your etymological voyages!