7. A computer program product stored in a computer readable storage medium, comprising computer program code that, when executed by an information handling system, causes the information handling system to perform actions comprising: analyzing a plurality of words included in a plurality of electronic documents, wherein the analysis identifies at least one of the plurality of words as being a portmanteau; identifying a plurality of morphemes included in the identified portmanteau and one or more candidate words that correspond to each of the identified morphemes, wherein each of the candidate words has a candidate word meaning; and deriving a portmanteau meaning corresponding to the identified portmanteau from at least two of the candidate word meanings, wherein the deriving comprises: calculating a first string metric between a leading morpheme that corresponds to a first portion of the portmanteau and the candidate word corresponding to the leading morpheme; calculating a second string metric between a trailing morpheme that corresponds to a second portion of the portmanteau and the candidate word corresponding to the trailing morpheme; and analyzing a combined usage of the leading morpheme and the trailing morpheme by combining the first and second string metric, wherein the combined usage is based on the combination of the first and second string metric; and storing the identified portmanteau and the derived portmanteau meaning in a dictionary utilized by a question answering (QA) system, wherein the QA system utilizes the derived portmanteau meaning to understand and answer one or more questions corresponding to the identified portmanteau.
10. The computer program product of claim 7 wherein the first and second string metric are each Levenshtein distance scores.