“Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll is a fairy tale poem describing a boy’s quest to rid his land of the evil Jabberwock. Lewis Carroll wrote the first stanza years before the rest of the poem appeared in Through the Looking Glass (Jabberwocky, n.d.). Carroll uses portmanteaus, words made up of other words, and shows the use of several onomatopoeias, which occur when the sound of a word becomes it meaning (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). Carroll invented blended words and called them portmanteaus. The term portmanteaus derived from the idea of cramming clothing into a portmanteau, a traveling case. In the first stanza, he uses “slithy” and “mimsy”. “Slithy” means lithe and slim. “Mimsy” means flimsy and miserable. Later in the poem, he uses “gyre”
