I was extremely confused at first because I put in two words in the input box, and clicking 'merge' would do nothing. When I see 'merge', I expect that it will somehow merge the two words I've entered. You should change that button or at least add some text so it's a little more obvious what's going on. Or maybe add some code to alert the user that only one word is expected if/when they enter two.
When I think of notable portmanteaus e.g. chortle, chillax they don't often fit with the formula of matching whole phonemes at the end of the first word and the beginning of the second (Chortle uses the first phoneme, the middle phoneme of word two, then back to word one to finish).
That said, the werdmerge discovered concept of a chillaxative made me chortle a bit.
If you're getting your phonemes from an IPA dictionary, couldn't you check for emphasis too?
Seems like you'd want to match words that begin and end in weak syllables, e.g. Beethoven + veneer = Beethoveneer (overwrought, superficially emotional music).
You can also pair strong syllables: sorbet + Bayes = Sorbayes (dessert ordered on the condition that real ice cream is unavailable).
But putting a weak last with a strong first wrong-foots you: Beethovunforgiven.
EDIT: in case it sounds like I'm nitpicking, I love this.
the hardest part about this site for me was finding a good dictionary of words->phonemes... unfortunately what i found did not come with emphasis. if you want to try to find a better dictionary for me i'd check it out. good luck though with the way google's search is these days ;?j
my confusion i think stems from the fact that it looks like the results (with the star above) on the bottom happen when i was hitting the merge button (with two words in the box). when in fact the results are not the seemingly random one at the bottom.
There's a small, recent scholarly literature on this in computational linguistics, referring to these as "lexical blends". This journal article is the most prominent publication, I believe: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/coli.2010.36... . The first author, Paul Cook, did a dissertation on them.
You might consider adding a popup or a footer note that describes what the stars with exclamation points do. My guess is that they either report a profane word or bookmark a word combination, but I couldn't tell you for sure. Clicking on one didn't give me much either.
