Dynamic Portmanteau Word Semantic Identification

An approach is provided to discover new portmanteau, such as when ingesting documents into a question answering (QA) system. The approach works by analyzing a words included in electronic documents and identifies words as being possible portmanteaus. To analyze a portmanteau found in a document, the approach identifies morphemes that are included in the identified portmanteau and candidate words that correspond to each of the identified morphemes. A meaning for the new portmanteau is then derived from the meanings of the candidate word meanings.