Gunner

How to spell gunner

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce gunner

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does gunner mean?

1. nounA member of the armed forces, or a crew member, whose job is to aim and fire a gun, especially artillery or a mounted weapon.

Gunner in a sentence

• The gunner adjusted the elevation of the field cannon before the order to fire.

• Each bomber carried a tail gunner to defend against fighters from behind.

Where does gunner come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The word grows out of 'gun', a noun recorded in English from around the 1330s. The leading theory traces 'gun' to the Old Norse woman's name Gunnhildr, a compound in which both 'gunnr' and 'hildr' mean 'war' or 'battle'; medieval soldiers had a habit of giving large weapons female pet names, and a great crossbow or cannon listed in a 1330s Windsor Castle inventory as 'Lady Gunilda' seems to have shortened to 'gunne'. From that base English formed 'gunner' with the agent suffix -er, attested by the late 1300s for the person who served and fired a piece of artillery. As firearms evolved, the sense stayed put: the one who works the gun, whether in a fortress, aboard a ship, or in an aircraft turret. The doubled n, which is the only real spelling trap, simply reflects the ordinary English rule of doubling a single final consonant after a short stressed vowel before adding -er.

How the word is built

• gun (firearm)
• -ner (agent suffix; the final n of gun is doubled before -er)