Clexa
Clexa is the ship name for Clarke and Lexa from The 100. It is a portmanteau: built by joining a piece of one name to a piece of the other.
Engine version 1.0 · Breakdown computed from the live checker · Research Desk
Structure
cl from Clarke, plus lexa from Lexa.
Clarke coverage 33%
Lexa coverage 100%
At the join, le, a consonant meets a vowel, which usually reads cleanly and keeps the two halves distinct.
Why this name is shaped the way it is
Two letters from Clarke, the whole of Lexa. Five characters total, which is at the short end of what stays traceable.
What our own engine would have built
Handed Clarke and Lexa with no knowledge of the fandom, the blender proposes Clarxa, Claxa, Lerke, Clarkxa, Lexrke, Lexke. Clexa is not among them. That is the normal result, and it is the clearest illustration of why this site refuses to call any candidate the best one. A community picked Clexa for reasons no software can see.
Reading it out loud
The join sits at le, and that is the part worth saying aloud before committing to a name. Clexa carries it without trouble, which is a large part of why it stuck: a ship name has to survive being said in a sentence, not only being typed into a tag. It matters more than it sounds. A blend that reads cleanly on a page and stumbles in speech tends to lose to a plainer alternative, however elegant it looked when it was written down.
If you are naming a pairing of your own
The useful lesson from Clexa is not the name itself but what it kept. A blend that works holds enough of both halves that a reader who knows Clarke and Lexa recognises them without being told, and stops there. Taking more from one side than the other is what produces a name that reads as one person rather than two.
If you want to run the same check on a name of your own, the draft checker does exactly what produced the breakdown above, and the ship name generator builds candidates from two names you supply. The method behind the scoring explains what the coverage figures mean and, more importantly, what they cannot tell you.
More from The 100
Other portmanteaus
Questions
What is the ship name for Clarke and Lexa?
Clexa. It is the name the The 100 fandom uses for Clarke and Lexa as a pairing, and it is what you will see on tags, fan work and video titles about the two of them together.
What does Clexa mean?
Clexa is the ship name for Clarke and Lexa from The 100. A ship name is a nickname for a pairing, and shipping means wanting two characters to be together.
Who is Clexa?
Clexa is not a person. It refers to Clarke and Lexa as a pairing, which is how fandom communities talk about two characters together in one word.
How was Clexa formed?
By joining cl from Clarke to lexa from Lexa. That keeps 33% of the first name and 100% of the second.
Is Clexa the only ship name for Clarke and Lexa?
No. Two names can be joined in several ways, and from Clarke and Lexa alone a blender produces Clarxa, Claxa, Lerke among others. Clexa is the one the community settled on, and that is a matter of use rather than of structure: a name becomes the name when enough people tag with it.
Where would I see Clexa written?
Mostly as a tag. Ship names exist because writing out Clarke and Lexa every time is tedious in a tag, a title or a search box, and one word does the same job. You will find it on fan work archives, in video titles, and in the search terms people use when they are looking for work about this pairing specifically rather than about The 100 generally.
Does using Clexa mean it is canon?
No, and the two are unrelated. A ship name records that people are interested in Clarke and Lexa as a pairing. Whether The 100 ever puts them together is a separate question, and some of the most used ship names belong to pairings that never happen in the story at all.