Corny

How to spell corny

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce corny

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does corny mean?

1. adjectiveTrite, overly sentimental, or unsophisticated in a way that seems old-fashioned or clumsy.

Corny in a sentence

• The wedding speech was sweet but a little corny.

• He told a corny joke that made everyone groan.

Where does corny come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This sense of corny grew out of American slang in the early twentieth century, where 'corn' had become shorthand for something rustic, unsophisticated, or sentimental. The underlying noun 'corn' descends from Old English 'corn', a word for grain that was shared across the Germanic languages and is related to the Latin 'granum', meaning a seed or grain. By the 1930s American jazz musicians used 'corn-fed' and then simply 'corny' to mock music that was old-fashioned, overly sentimental, or fit only for country audiences far from the city. From music the term spread to jokes, films, and romantic gestures that strike people as clumsily mawkish. The spelling is entirely regular, just the everyday noun corn plus the familiar -y ending, which makes it an easy word once the link to 'corn' is remembered.

How the word is built

• corn (grain)
• -y (adjective suffix, 'characterised by')