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What is "pun"

Crossword clues for pun

pun
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
pun
I.noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ "Pardon the pun, but we were all in the same boat," said Navy lieutenant Green.
▪ "Seven days without food makes one weak'' is a pun on the words "week'' and "weak'', and also on the different meanings of "one''.
▪ The audience groaned at his pun.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Among the devices he used were puns.
▪ And we do, I mean, we both do, we both make a lot of unintentional puns, uh.
▪ Dreams are puns on words and situations in the engram bank.
▪ Drinks in hand, the crowd around me erupted with groans of exasperation, the kind usually reserved for terrible puns.
▪ He made a pun on it for the title of his revue Cranks.
▪ Instead of charging bulls, Professor Ito bravely faces a barrage of puns.
▪ Political problems which might have stymied Solomon were resolved in a pun or an epigram..
▪ Waterhouse is given to such puns.
II.verb
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ An awl is an iron instrument used for piercing leather, but the word has been in punning use since time immemorial.
▪ Food for thoughts, puns the hysterical Kate as they depart.
▪ It also puns the Kray/Crow connection and gangland murders.
▪ Oh, how he could pun.
▪ The hotelier family's punning motif-a bull with its horns to the ground-was woven into the vestibule carpet.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Pun

Pun \Pun\, v. t. [See Pound to beat.] To pound. [Obs.]

He would pun thee into shivers with his fist.
--Shak.

Pun

Pun \Pun\, n. [Cf. Pun to pound, Pound to beat.] A play on words which have the same sound but different meanings; an expression in which two different applications of a word present an odd or ludicrous idea; a kind of quibble or equivocation.
--Addison.

A better put on this word was made on the Beggar's Opera, which, it was said, made Gay rich, and Rich gay.
--Walpole.

Pun

Pun \Pun\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Punned; p. pr. & vb. n. Punning.] To make puns, or a pun; to use a word in a double sense, especially when the contrast of ideas is ludicrous; to play upon words; to quibble.
--Dryden.

Pun

Pun \Pun\, v. t. To persuade or affect by a pun.
--Addison.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
pun

1660s (first attested in Dryden), of uncertain origin, perhaps from pundigron, which is perhaps a humorous alteration of Italian puntiglio "equivocation, trivial objection," diminutive of Latin punctum "point." This is pure speculation. The verb also is attested from 1660s. Related: Punned; punning.\n\nPun was prob. one of the clipped words, such as cit, mob, nob, snob, which came into fashionable slang at or after the Restoration.

[OED]

Wiktionary
pun

Etymology 1 vb. (context transitive English) To beat; strike with force; ram; pound, as in a mortar; reduce to powder. Etymology 2

n. A joke or type of wordplay in which similar senses or sounds of two words or phrases, or different senses of the same word, are deliberately confused. vb. To make or tell a pun; make a play on words.

Related phrases:
WordNet
pun

  1. n. a humorous play on words; "I do it for the pun of it"; "his constant punning irritated her" [syn: punning, wordplay, paronomasia]

  2. [also: punning, punned]

pun

  1. v. make a play on words; "Japanese like to pun--their language is well suited to punning"

  2. [also: punning, punned]

Wikipedia
Pun

The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play that suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use of homophonic, homographic, metonymic, or figurative language. A pun differs from a malapropism in that a malapropism is an incorrect variation on a correct expression, while a pun involves expressions with multiple correct interpretations. Puns may be regarded as in-jokes or idiomatic constructions, as their usage and meaning are specific to a particular language and its culture.

Puns have a long history in human writing. Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs were originally based on punning systems, and the Roman playwright Plautus was famous for his puns and word games. Punning has been credited as the fundamental concept behind alphabets, writing, and even human civilization.

Pun (disambiguation)

Pun may refer to:

  • Pun, a figure of speech that plays on words that are similar to each other
  • Pan (surname) (also spelt Pun or Poon), a Chinese surname
  • PunBB, an internet discussion board system, originally known as Pun
  • a tool used to tamp down clay: see puddling (engineering)
  • Big Pun, a rapper
  • Type punning, a computer programming technique
Related phrases:

Usage examples of "pun".

He would have to remember the pun to tell Alec Diger later, if there was a later.

Richmond, and she imagines the legions the place must harbor just below the historical surface, and laughs out loud, I think, as her punning answer occurs to her, with the added bonus of a message in it for me.

He named one of the sauciest of the old-time nautches, and smiled at his own pun.

Wally beta-tested a new pun he was working up, to the effect that if the promised paperless digital world ever materialized, writers would all be The Artists Formerly Known In Prints.

The air is full of real and false sweetmeats, pamphlets, pasquinades, and puns.

Certainly if Banville were to lay claim to having invented rhymes that are puns, we could only say that he was a plagiarist after reading Charles Poncy.

They were also riping people for the dangerous jobs, the jobs nobody in their right minds would take, pun intended.

He and I were once forcibly ejected from a Halifax restaurant called Chicken Tandoor for persistent punning.

Togarmi, Abulafia freely sprinkled his texts with codes, acrostics, and number-letter puns to simultaneously befuddle his persecutors and communicate freely with knowledgeable Spanish mystics like Joseph Gikatilia, a respected member of his circle.

The thrill of finding an allusion, of locating the precise source of a teasing echo, of suddenly catching an obscure pun or seeing what should have been an obvious joke makes the reader alert, curious, eager to find new puzzles to solve.

Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended.

Gobei laughed in delight at his own pun on the words for soup stock made of dried bonito and the word for soldier.

Hertz had suddenly remembered having seen Punning Parker in Havana a number of times recently, and the word had gotten around that Punning Parker was a bad but clever one.

But Punning Parker had just raked his chestnuts out of the fire by that dive under the keel.

Hertz purloined those ideas as his own, Punning did not say anything about it.