“Blend” is correct; such words are also known as portmanteau words. I just saw a crossword puzzle in the paper a couple of days ago that had portmanteaus as a theme, with the root words intersecting at a common letter, such as “gasoline” (across) sharing an “o” with “alcohol” (down) to form “gasohol.”
Don’t leave out the origin of the name ‘Pakistan.’ As I understand it, the name was coined in the early 20th Cent. from the initials of three provinces in Northwest India and then had the generic ‘-istan’ (land of) tacked onto the end:
Punjab, Ahmedabad, Kashmir -istan
Every time someone makes this kind of distinction, I ask what they call those acronyms/initialisms that are spelled out by some people and pronounced another way by others. No one has ever given me an answer.
Furthermore, I’ve only communicated with one person who actually had a good reason (speech synthesis software) for make this acronym/initialism distinction and even that was not convincing. To me it seems to be an unnecessary level of pedantry.
Ummm. . . OK.
Here’s some history on acronym.
From the OED online:
So both initials and syllables can constitute an acronym. (There are several other syllable examples given.)
But is IRA to be pronounced eye-are-ay or like the name Ira? In the US we use the individual letters, but I don’t know British practice.
This sort of construction is called a ‘portmanteau word’. The phrase was coined by CL Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), and was taken up by HW Fowler in his epoch-making Modern English Usage.
Regards,
Agback
A = pre-20th century
B = acronym etymology
A + B = false (almost always)