Sunny

How to spell sunny

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sunny

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sunny mean?

1. adjectiveFull of or brightened by sunshine; cheerful and bright.

Sunny in a sentence

• We booked a holiday somewhere warm and sunny for the winter.

• The kitchen feels sunny in the morning because it faces east.

Where does sunny come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word grows directly from the Old English 'sunne', the native Germanic name for the sun, a word with close cousins across the Germanic family such as Dutch 'zon' and German 'Sonne'. The adjective 'sunny' is a later English formation, attaching the productive ending '-y' (meaning 'full of' or 'characterised by') to 'sun', and it is recorded from around the 1300s. Its earliest use described weather and places flooded with sunlight, but by the 1500s writers were already applying it figuratively to a cheerful, bright temperament. The doubled 'n' that trips writers up is a regular English spelling habit: when '-y' joins a short, single-vowel word ending in a consonant, that consonant doubles to keep the vowel short, just as in 'funny' and 'runny'. So the spelling itself is a small clue that the root vowel stays clipped rather than stretching out.

How the word is built

• sun (the star/daylight)
• -ny (adjective suffix, doubled n after a short vowel)

Words that sound like sunny

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• sonny: An informal, often affectionate or patronising way of addressing a boy or a younger man.