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A pun (also known as paronomasia) is a figure of speech, or word play which consists of a deliberate confusion of similar words within a phrase or phrases for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious. A pun can rely on the assumed equivalency of multiple similar words (homonymy), of different shades of meaning of one word (polysemy), or of a literal meaning with a metaphor.
Walter Redfern (in Puns, Blackwell, London, 1984) succinctly said: "To pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms." For example, a pun is used in the sentence "There is nothing punny about bad puns." The pun takes place in the deliberate confusion of the implied word "funny" by the substitution of the word "punny", a heterophone of "funny".
A pun using heterophones, words with similar but inexact sounds are called an imperfect pun, but are also known as a malapropism. An example of this is saying "the world is perspiring against me." as opposed to "the world is conspiring against me." Bad puns are sometimes called "cheesy".
In order to be able to pun effectively it is necessary that a language must include homonyms which may readily be misrepresented as synonyms. Languages with complex gender or case structures tend not to facilitate this, although puns can be constructed in all languages with varying degrees of difficulty; that is, puns are said to be easy to construct in languages such as Chinese or English, but rarer in Russian.
The word pun itself is thought to be originally a contraction of the (now archaic) pundigrion. This latter term is thought to have originated from punctilious, which itself derived from the Italian puntiglio (originally meaning "a fine point"), diminutive of punto, "point", from the Latin punctus, past participle of pungere, "to prick." These etymological sources are reported in the Oxford English Dictionary, which labels them "conjecture." (There is no creditable documentation for the notion that the word is a backronym for "play upon nouns"[1].)
Perhaps the oldest puns are those used by the culture of the Hebrews and Jews, some found in the Bible and some still in modern use as insults or to ridicule to those seen as enemy to the tribe or religion. For example see Yeshu. Puns on the names of pharaohs of Egypt such as during the reign of Solomon, have been shown to provide dates of pharaoh reign or a time line to the stories.
Puns can be subdivided into several varieties:
The compound pun is one in which multiple puns are colocated for additional and amplified effect. Examples of this are the following:
Cornell linguist Charles Hockett told a story of a man who bought a cattle ranch for his sons and named it the "Focus Ranch" because it was where the sons raise meat (sun's rays meet).
A sign in a golf-cart shop reads "When drinking, don't drive. Don't even putt." (The puns are on "driving" and "putting" a golf ball, vs. "driving" a car or "putting" around in a golf cart.)
The last exchange of a knock knock joke runs: Q: "Eskimo Christian Italian who?" A: "Eskimo Christian Italian no lies." (The pun, involving an indeterminate number of sub-puns, is on the phrase "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies".)
Extended puns occur when multiple puns referring to one general idea are used throughout a longer utterance. An example of this is the following story about a fight, with extended puns about cookery:
A fight broke out in a kitchen. Egged on by the waiters, two cooks peppered each other with punches. One man, a greasy foie gras specialist, ducked the first blows, but his goose was cooked when the other cold-cocked him. The man who beet him, a weedy salad expert with big cauliflower ears, tried to flee the scene, but was cornered in the maize of tables by a husky off-duty cob. He was charged with a salt and battery. He claims to look forward to the suit, as he's always wanted to be a sous-chef.
Or this one about various lower life forms:
I moss say I'm taking a lichen to that fun-gi, even though his jokes are in spore taste. Algae the first to say that they mushroom out of control.
Humor is the most common intent of puns in recent times. It is a form particularly admired in Britain, and forms a core element of the British cult comedy show I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue and in times past My Word. The late Richard Whiteley was famed for his dextrous use of puns as host of the UK words and numbers game show Countdown.
While generally eschewed in more formal settings, puns of greater or lesser subtlety are employed to good effect by many popular artists and writers. For example, names based on puns (such as calling a character who is always almost late Justin Thyme) can be found in Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, The Eyre Affair, Asterix, Hamlet, The Simpsons, the Carmen Sandiego computer games, and many works of Spider Robinson, including the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series. This is known as a gag name.
In music, puns often find their way into hip hop/rap music as clever delivery of punchlines. For example, those who diss rapper 50 Cent often use a play of words on his stage name. For example Ja Rule would become "Ja Fool" or Insane Clown Posse would become "Insane Clown Pussies"
How Soon Is Now? by English pop band The Smiths features the lyric:
<blockquote>"I am the son, and the heir."<br> (pun on son/sun and heir/air)</blockquote>
In addition to works of popular culture, puns are also found in serious literature. See Alexander Pope, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Bloch, and others like Sing money discussed under word play. In the past, the serious pun was an important and standard rhetorical or poetic device, as in Shakespeare's Richard III:
<blockquote>"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York"<br> (pun on homophony of son and sun)</blockquote>
John Donne is another who used serious puns in his work. For instance, he puns repeatedly on his own name (which is pronounced "Dun") in his poem "A Hymn to God the Father". Twice after imploring God to forgive certain kinds of sins and weaknesses, he ends a stanza by saying "When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done, "For I have more."<br/>
One interpretation could be that Donne is saying, "God, when you have forgiven me this much, you are not done (finished)/you do not have John Donne (safe yet), for I have more sins to confess." (Some think the last line is a pun on the name of Donne's wife, Ann More. This does not fit Donne's meaning, however.) In the third stanza, having received assurance, counteracting his fears, "that at my death Thy Son "Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore"<br/> (another Son/sun pun), he ends the poem "And having done that, Thou hast done; I fear no more."
A biblical pun of serious intent is found in ''Matthew'' 16.18:
<blockquote>"Thou art Peter"
[Greek Πετρος, Petros
], and upon this rock
[Greek πετρα, petra
]I will build my church."<br> (pun on the double meaning of petros/Petros: in the first part of the sentence the word appears to stand for a personal name, but in the second, petra ("rock") makes the listener reevaluate the first petros as its second meaning, "stone").</blockquote>
European heraldry contains the technique of canting arms, that can be considered punning. Visual puns, in which the image is at odds with the inscription, are also common in Dutch gable stones as well as in cartoons such as Lost Consonants or The Far Side.
Russian NBA player Andrei Kirilenko has chosen to wear the number 47, unusual in the NBA, on his gear, because of the coincidence that his initials together with this number form the abbreviation AK-47, the name of the famous Russian rifle, named after its inventor and the year it was invented (Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947).
Official puns are rare, but there are a few, some of them intentional:
There are numerous pun formats:
The term punning is sometimes used to describe either unintentional muddled thinking or intentional deception where the same word (such as a homographic pun) is used with two subtly different meanings. For example, in statistics the word significant is usually assumed to be a shortened form of "statistically significant", with the associated precisely defined meaning. It is punning to use significant with the meaning "of practical significance" in contexts where "statistically significant" would be plausible interpretation.
A programming technique that subverts or circumvents the type system of a programming language in order to achieve an effect that would be difficult or impossible to achieve within the bounds of the formal language is commonly known as "type punning" in computer science.