What is the term for a common or potential pun of another word using a misspelling? For example, I thought the made-up word bikery was a funny sort of play on the word bakery. What, therefore, would bikery be called in relation to bakery?
Learn English – Term for misspelling used as pun of another word
portmanteau-wordspuns
Related Solutions
As other answers have noted, these are examples of puns.
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic, homographic, metonymic, or metaphorical language.
But what sort of puns? The Reader's Digest condensed version ("What's that?") of the Wikipedia article may help us decide:
Puns can be classified in various ways:
The homophonic pun, a common type, uses word pairs which sound alike (homophones) but are not synonymous. For example, in George Carlin's phrase "Atheism is a non-prophet institution", the word "prophet" is put in place of its homophone "profit", altering the common phrase "non-profit institution".
A homographic pun exploits words which are spelled the same (homographs) but possess different meanings and sounds. Because of their nature, they rely on sight more than hearing, contrary to homophonic puns. An example which combines homophonic and homographic punning is Douglas Adams's line "You can tune a guitar, but you can't tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass."
Homonymic puns, another common type, arise from the exploitation of words which are both homographs and homophones. The statement "Being in politics is just like playing golf: you are trapped in one bad lie after another" puns on the two meanings of the word lie as "a deliberate untruth" and as "the position in which something rests".
A compound pun is a statement that contains two or more puns. For example, a complex statement by Richard Whately includes four puns: "Why can a man never starve in the Great Desert? Because he can eat the sand which is there. But what brought the sandwiches there? Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered and bred." This pun uses "sand which is there/sandwiches there, "Ham/ham", "mustered/mustard", and "bred/bread". Compound puns may also combine two phrases that share a word. For example, "Where do mathematicians go on weekends? To a Möbius strip club!" puns on Möbius strip and strip club.
A recursive pun is one in which the second aspect of a pun relies on the understanding of an element in the first. For example the statement "π is only half a pie." (π radians is 180 degrees, or half a circle, and a pie is a complete circle). Another example is "Infinity is not in finity," which means infinity is not in finite range. Another example is "A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother." Finally, we are given "Immanuel doesn't pun, he Kant" by Oscar Wilde.
This is a rhetorical device known as antiphrasis.
antiphrasis
n
(Literature / Rhetoric) Rhetoric the use of a word in a sense opposite to its normal one, esp for ironic effect
An example of this would be Perdue Chicken's advertising tag line of a couple decades ago:
It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.
Other examples:
"Come here, Tiny," he said to the fat man.
It was a cool 115 degrees in the shade.
Note that the irony is established by context, i.e., reference to another part of the sentence or to an obvious fact. In the examples above, note that "Tiny" and "cool" are used in deliberate contrast to information related later. This differs from simple irony, which is a statement whose intended meaning is the opposite of its literal one, in that it must play on that opposite within the statement. For example, in the "Tiny" example, if the speaker were simply to say to the fat man
"You look like a skeleton."
That would be an ironic statement but it would not be antiphrasis. Antiphrasis requires the play of "tiny" and "fat" for its effect.
Best Answer
A portmanteau combines parts of two different words (in this case, "bike" and "-kery", from "bakery") to form a new word.
Wikipedia has a long list, including such words as "cyborg" ("cyb-ernetic" + "org-anism"), "gaydar" ("gay" + "ra-dar"), and "mockumentary" ("mock" + "do-cumentary").
Some portmanteaus—like those above—become regular words in the language, and can assume either less-formal status ("gaydar"), or completely formal status ("cyborg"); the only distinction is where and how people decide to use them.
So in this case, you've simply noticed an informal portmanteau that "didn't stick."
You could also call it one type of a "linguistic blend" in formal speech, but that would be less specific relative to this example. Essentially, that's what the "pun" of your title indicates.