Last Update: Jan 03, 2023
This is a question our experts keep getting from time to time. Now, we have got the complete detailed explanation and answer for everyone, who is interested!
Asked by: Selena Casper
Score: 5/5
(12 votes)
Fun commonly functions as an adjective («I had a fun time») and as a noun («Let’s have some fun»), and somewhat less commonly as a verb («I’m just funning you»).
Is having fun an adjective?
As detailed above, ‘fun’ can be an adjective, a verb or a noun. Adjective usage: We had a fun time at the party. Adjective usage: He is such a fun person to be with. … Noun usage: I want to go out this evening and have some fun.
Why is so fun grammatically incorrect?
Almost any elementary school teacher will tell you, it’s grammatically incorrect to say “as fun” or “so fun.” In these instances, “as” and “so” are adverbs, and “fun” is a noun, and adverbs never modify nouns. … “Fun is a noun.” Beyond that, it sounds stupid.
Is funner grammatically correct?
But if you’re thinking that that logic is downright silly, most dictionary establishments agree with you. And they also agree that…the answer to “is funner a word?” is yes. If you want to consider “fun,” as an adjective, a word, then “funner” is indeed a word, as is “funnest,” per normal rules of adjective formation.
What are adjectives give 10 examples?
Examples of adjectives
- They live in a beautiful house.
- Lisa is wearing a sleeveless shirt today. This soup is not edible.
- She wore a beautiful dress.
- He writes meaningless letters.
- This shop is much nicer.
- She wore a beautiful dress.
- Ben is an adorable baby.
- Linda’s hair is gorgeous.
42 related questions found
What are 10 nouns?
10 Types of Nouns That You Use All The Time
- Common Noun.
- Proper Noun.
- Abstract Noun.
- Concrete Noun.
- Countable Noun.
- Uncountable Noun.
- Compound Noun.
- Collective Noun.
Is Goodest a word?
No, ‘goodest’ is not a word. The word you want is ‘best. ‘ To form the superlative form, you often add -est to an adjective.
Is a badder a word?
Slang. comparative of bad1 (def. a comparative of bad1. …
When did funnest become a word?
Funner & funnest
We may often use fun as an adjective today (‘I had a fun time’), but when the word first entered the English language at the end of the 17th century it was mostly used as a verb or a noun.
How do you say so much fun?
other ways to say — so much fun
- Lets go outside and play. It’ll be so much fun.
- It is fun to watch television.
- We can have a lot of fun reading the book together.
- We had fun at the carnival.
- That is a fun game.
How do you use the word fun?
- [S] [T] Driving a car is a lot of fun. ( …
- [S] [T] I would never make fun of you. ( …
- [S] [T] It is fun to speak in English. ( …
- [S] [T] It’s fun to visit old friends. ( …
- [S] [T] Sounds like you’re having fun. ( …
- [S] [T] That sounds like a lot of fun. ( …
- [S] [T] Tom and Mary had fun together. (
Can fun be used as a noun?
Fun commonly functions as an adjective («I had a fun time») and as a noun («Let’s have some fun«), and somewhat less commonly as a verb («I’m just funning you»).
Which kind of noun is fun?
Fun is an uncountable noun meaning ‘pleasure and enjoyment’: We had such fun together. It was fun to go to the beach with Rita’s family.
What is an adjective for fun?
amusing, humorous, comic, comical, droll, laughable, chucklesome, hilarious, hysterical, riotous, uproarious, witty, waggish, facetious, jolly, jocular, entertaining, diverting, sparkling, scintillating, silly, absurd, ridiculous, ludicrous, risible, farcical, preposterous, slapstick, rib-tickling, wacky, comedic, …
Is adjective a great?
great (adjective) great (adverb) great (noun) … Great Power (noun)
What does badder mean in slang?
Word forms: badder or baddest slang. good; excellent.
Whats the difference between badder and budder?
Manufacturers use these two terms interchangeably, but ideally, their names should match the texture and consistency. While budder retains a creamy, smooth texture (butter-like), badder is more cake-like batter or resembles sticky sauce.
Where can I use worse and worst?
Remember that worse is used to compare two things, such as «now» and «before,» while worst compares three or more things. You might use worse than yesterday, but this doesn’t make it the worst cold you ever had.
What is a adjective for good?
great, satisfying, exceptional, positive, acceptable, satisfactory, valuable, superb, marvelous, bad, wonderful, favorable, excellent, respectable, honest, useful, talented, efficient, reliable, able.
Is Beautifulest a proper word?
Answer and Explanation: While beautiful is a word and the suffix -est can be added to the end of various adjectives to make them superlative, ‘beautifulest’ is not a word.
What does the term best girl mean?
: a favorite girl sweetheart.
What are 5 nouns?
Types Of Nouns
- Common noun.
- Proper noun.
- Concrete noun.
- Abstract noun.
- Collective nouns.
- Count and mass nouns.
What are adverb give 10 examples?
Examples
- He swims well.
- He ran quickly.
- She spoke softly.
- James coughed loudly to attract her attention.
- He plays the flute beautifully. ( after the direct object)
- He ate the chocolate cake greedily. ( after the direct object)
What are nouns examples?
A noun is a word that describes a person, place, thing, or idea. Examples of nouns include names, locations, objects in the physical world, or objects and concepts that do not exist in the physical world; for example, a dream or a theory.
I was walking to school (England) with my eight-year-old talking about stuff she’d been doing the day before. At some point she said that something had been «…funner…» than something else.
I did not immediately realise that ‘fun’ is, historically at least, a noun and NOT an adjective. So I was wondering in my head why ‘fun’ (as an adjective) sounded wrong when made into the standard comparative for a single syllable adjective (i.e. ‘funner’).
I have since looked ‘fun’ up and realise that ‘officially’ ‘fun’ is not an adjective (see OED, and https://grammarianism.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/can-fun-be-an-adjective/).
I’m wondering whether adjectival usage is increasing. Whether it is regional (I’m guessing it’s an American import); And whether, adjectivally, it is commoner to say funner and funnest, or more fun and most fun. The latter sound better to me, presumably because they are usages that are found when fun is used as a noun.
Jerry Jones writing recently in the Bucks County Courier Times objects to the following use of the word fun:
- Every day should be as fun as a Phillies game
What’s the problem? Well, according to Jones, the sentence above is ungrammatical. He explains why:
The sentence contains a blatantly ungrammatical misuse of the word “fun,” and even worse, the way the sentence was structured made no sense whatsoever. Almost any elementary school teacher will tell you, it’s grammatically incorrect to say “as fun” or “so fun.” In these instances, “as” and “so” are adverbs, and “fun” is a noun, and adverbs never modify nouns. The noun “fun” should be modified with the preposition “much,” as in “as much fun” or “so much fun.”
This use of fun has been discussed by grammarians for a long time, and it seems that Jones has also been aware of it for decades. He writes:
The first time I ever heard “that was so fun” was somewhere in the late-1960s in a conversation with my eldest son, Jerry, who was then still in elementary school. He was describing some school activity he and his classmates had obviously enjoyed. “What was that you just said?” I asked incredulously, hoping I had misunderstood my normally well-spoken son. “That was so fun,” he repeated. “That’s totally ungrammatical,” I insisted. “Fun is a noun.” Beyond that, it sounds stupid.
Is Jones right? Is fun always a noun?
It seems that English has changed over time, and that fun can be used both as a noun and as an adjective. What’s the evidence for this? Let’s first look at some data in which fun is used:
- That should be fun
- She’s so completely lovely and fun and joyful.
These examples are from the ICE-GB Corpus at UCL, a collection of authentic spoken and written English. In these cases fun occurs after the linking verb be. In this position it can be a noun or an adjective, because after linking verbs both nouns and adjectives can occur. However, notice how in the second example fun occurs in a list of words that includes lovely and joyful. These are adjectives. Now, that doesn’t prove that fun is also an adjective, but it does suggest it.
But consider now the following attested data from a recent lecture by David Denison:
- Doing something fun like redecorating your room…is really interesting biz for a teen who loves being busy. (1951 OED v. teen n.2)
- Andrew and I are having a very fun time together, yes. (1988, COCA)
- And they are so fun to eat! (1979 Chuck Kinder, The Silver Ghost, COHA)
- […] to a place as fun and earthy as a mud fight (1990 San Francisco Chronicle, COCA)
- Don’t be too worried if the software seems too fun to be educational. (1993, COCA)
- Walking and looking is boring. Touching is funner. (1990 Denver Post, COCA)
- It used to be buying clothes was one of the funnest things in the world; – now it’s more a necessity. (1990 Time 1990/02/19, TMC)
For some speakers, Denison among them, not all of these examples are acceptable, but it’s clear from attested usage that fun as an adjective has been part of some speakers’ idiolects for quite a long time. In the last two examples funner and funnest, as comparative and superlative forms, are especially revealing.
The word fun can even be used as a verb, as in the recent car advertisement slogan Go fun yourself.
So, rather than deny that fun can be an adjective or a verb, we need to recognise that English is not static, and that over time words can be used in different ways.
The full text of David Denison’s lecture can be found here.
For those interested in a little info about this site: it’s a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for — just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn’t be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary — which is now in the public domain. However, after a day’s work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary — which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it’s not properly structured for parsing. That’s when I stumbled across the UBY project — an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I’m happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
Several readers have asked for a post about the use of fun as an adjective.
Many English speakers cringe at usage like this:
One of my funnest rides I’ve owned was a chevy S-10
Knitting is funner than cleaning
So we had this really fun week…
What’s the most funnest online game?
The fourth example is doubly unacceptable since it uses most with the –est ending, but the other examples reflect a usage that is in the process of becoming standard.
The word fun probably originated as a dialect pronunciation of Middle English fon, which as an adjective meant “foolish” and as a noun meant “fool.” The Middle English verb fonnen meant “to be foolish, to be infatuated.”
By the 1680s, fun could be used as a verb meaning “to cheat, to hoax.” Dr. Johnson didn’t like fun; he called it “a low cant [slang] word.” This verbal use of fun is still heard in American dialect: She said she’d thrown out my lucky shirt, but I knew she was just funning me.
The earliest example in the OED of the adjective funny, “mirth-producing,” is dated 1756.
Contemporary use of fun as an adjective is on the cusp between nonstandard and standard English. It will eventually prevail as an adjective in all its uses, but for the moment, educated opinion is against it, at least in its comparative forms.
Because I’m already accustomed to the noun fun used attributively in an expression like “fun fair,” I don’t have any trouble accepting a sentence like “He’s a fun guy.”
The word “funner,” on the other hand, strikes my ear as babyish. To the under-30, it probably sounds as inoffensive as “clearer” or “higher.”
Bottom line: For the next 25 years or so, careful speakers and writers will avoid comparing “fun” as if it were an adjective.
Stop making those embarrassing mistakes! Subscribe to Daily Writing Tips today!
You will improve your English in only 5 minutes per day, guaranteed!
Subscribers get access to our archives with 800+ interactive exercises!
You’ll also get three bonus ebooks completely free!
