people who follow the crowd, like a flock of sheep. From the combination of ‘sheep’ and ‘people’.Submitted from: United Kingdom on 03/01/2011
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The plural noun sheeple is what is technically referred to as a blend, a combination of the words sheep and people. A blend is a new word formed from parts of two (or possibly more) words in such a way that it cannot be further analyzed into morphemes (i.e. the smallest meaningful components of words). Other more familiar examples are brunch (breakfast and lunch) and chunnel (channel and tunnel). The concept of a blend (also called a portmanteau word) is nothing new. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, written in 1872, Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain the words of a poem and he replies: ’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.