Pun

How to spell pun

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pun

What does pun mean?

1. nounA joke that exploits the fact that a word has more than one meaning, or that two words sound alike.
2. verbTo make a joke that plays on the multiple meanings or similar sounds of words.

Pun in a sentence

• noun

  The bakery sign used a flour-based pun to draw in customers.

• verb

  He loves to pun on people's surnames during introductions.

• noun

  His speech was ruined by one groan-inducing pun after another.

• verb

  The columnist likes to pun whenever a headline allows it.

Where does pun come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Pun is a curiously rootless word whose origin nobody has pinned down with certainty. It appears suddenly in English in the second half of the 1600s, in the era of Restoration wit and wordplay, with no clear parent in any earlier language. The most repeated suggestion is that it was clipped from an older slang word, 'pundigrion', which may itself be a playful corruption of the Italian 'puntiglio', meaning 'a fine or quibbling point', from 'punto', a point. If that path is right, the modern meaning fits beautifully, since a pun turns on a single fine point of sound or sense. Because all of this is conjecture rather than documented fact, careful dictionaries simply label the origin unknown, and the very short, vowel-light spelling is one reason the word feels so abrupt on the page.

How the word is built

• pun (a single unanalysable root word; no prefix or suffix)