Shunned

How to spell shunned

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shunned

What does shunned mean?

1. verbPast tense of shun: deliberately avoided or rejected someone or something.

Shunned in a sentence

• After the scandal, his former colleagues shunned him at every meeting.

• The village shunned anyone who broke its strict rules.

Where does shunned come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'shun', which descends from the Old English scunian, meaning 'to abhor, to hate, or to keep away from'. The earliest recorded senses leaned heavily toward dread and loathing, so to shun something was first to recoil from it in horror rather than merely to ignore it. Its exact ancestry beyond Old English is uncertain; scholars have proposed links to other Germanic words for fright and avoidance, but no clean parallel survives, which keeps the deeper origin shadowy. Over the centuries the meaning softened into the modern sense of deliberately avoiding a person or thing, especially as a social punishment. The spelling trap lives in the ending: because 'shun' has a single short vowel followed by one consonant, the n doubles before -ed, giving 'shunned' rather than the wrong-looking 'shuned'.

How the word is built

• shun (to avoid, from Old English scunian)
• -n- (doubled consonant)
• -ed (past tense suffix)