Is 'Funnest' a Word?

Researching the word “funnest” and its close relation “funner” turned out to be a lot less fun than I had hoped — or at least more complicated.

First, the easy part. Everyone agrees that “fun” was originally just a noun. For example, you could say, “We had fun,” which is the grammatical equivalent of “We had cake.” Fun is more of a concept whereas cake is more of a thing, but they're both nouns. “Cake” may jump out at you more as one of those people-places-and-things concrete nouns we’ve talked about before, but “fun” is also a noun. It’s an abstract noun.

‘Fun,’ the Adjective

But now we head down the slippery slope of fun because many modern sources grudgingly (2) accept that “fun” can also be used as an adjective, as in “Squiggly throws a fun party.” (1, 3) In that sentence, “fun” is an adjective that modifies the noun “party.” It was a fun party.

How "fun" made its way from a noun to an adjective is a great illustration of how language can change over time. Nouns can be used to modify other nouns, and when they are they're called attributive nouns. In the phrase "sugar cookie," "sugar" is a noun, but it's being used in an attributive way to describe the cookie. Attributive nouns do the same thing as adjectives. You could say, "I ate a sugar cookie," or "I ate a yummy cookie." The sentences are constructed the same way, but "sugar" is an attributive noun and "yummy" is an adjective.

The Oxford English Dictionary notes a few uses of "fun" as an attributive noun such as "fun fair" and "fun-fest" in the early 1900s. It was probably from there that "fun" worked its way from noun to adjective. In English, nouns often end up becoming adjectives too. (1, 2)

A few sources note that using "fun" as an adjective is a generational thing. It's much more acceptable to children, (3) youngsters, (4) slackers, (5) and people who were born after 1970. (6) A Google Ngram search, which shows how often words are used in the books Google has scanned, shows that writers started...

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