Shun

How to spell shun

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shun

What does shun mean?

1. verbTo deliberately avoid or reject someone or something.

Shun in a sentence

• After the scandal, his former colleagues began to shun him at every meeting.

• Many savers shun risky investments and keep their money in cash.

Where does shun come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Old English verb scunian, which meant 'to abhor, to dread, to shrink back from', and it belonged to the native Germanic stock of English rather than being a later borrowing. The earliest sense carried a strong note of fear or loathing, so to shun something was to recoil from it in horror, not merely to keep your distance. Over the medieval period the feeling softened into the modern idea of deliberately keeping away from a person or thing, often as a social or moral choice. The exact older relatives in other Germanic languages are murky, which is part of why some dictionaries treat its deeper roots as uncertain. The spelling is mercifully phonetic: it simply mirrors the sound, with the 'sh' opening and the short 'un' that gave us the related noun and verb forms still used today.

How the word is built

• shun (single root from Old English scunian: to avoid, abhor)