Blending can refer to two different things: in linguistics, it is the process of combining the sounds and meanings of two or more words to form a new word, also known as a blend word or portmanteau. In education, blending is a method used to help children learn to read by combining different sounds, also known as phonemes, to form words.

In linguistics, there are different types of blends, including overlapping blends, which are those for which the ingredients consonants, vowels, or even syllables overlap to some extent. Blending may also occur with an error in lexical selection, which is the process by which a speaker uses their semantic knowledge to choose words.

In education, blending is a crucial skill that every child needs to start reading unknown words. It involves pushing together the sounds of the letters in the word in order to create the whole word. For example, a child trying to read the word ‘fish’, will isolate each of the letter sounds. When these three sounds are said in sequence, the word ‘fish’ is spoken. There are different types of blending techniques, including oral blending, which is hearing the sounds and blending them together in your head to produce the word, and blending for reading, where you see a word written down and you produce each of the sounds out loud.