User:Deathsythe/Malamanteau

On May 12th, 2010, xkcd featured a new comic named Malamanteau, showing a fictional Wikipedia-article named the same. The word malamanteau is itself a portmanteau and a malapropism, that is, it is a neologism created by combining two words in sound and meaning. Yet the word doesn't actually have a meaning in the English language.

Within a few hours the article was created on several Wikimedia-projects, including Wikipedia in various languages and Wiktionary. Since malamanteau is purely artificial and does not have any occurrences other than xkcd prior to May 12th it was rejected by Wikipedian Administrators - debate still taking place.

Malamanteau has made it's way into several blogs and articles, primarily because of its sudden impact on Wikipedia and the internet. For some hours during May 12th and 13th it was one of the most popular search terms on Google.

Appears to have been coined at Metafilter in 2007: http://ask.metafilter.com/67192/How-to-define-this-language-mistake htom (talk) 23:32, 14 May 2010 (UTC)