grammaticality - Is funner a word?



I am constantly told "funner" is not a word. Even Google auto corrects. Yet "funner" is used very often in spoken English with people I meet.


Is funner a word? If not why?


What causes it to not be a word?



Answer



The AHDEL has this USAGE NOTE:



The use of fun as an attributive adjective, as in a fun time, a fun place, probably originated in a playful reanalysis of the use of the word in sentences such as It is fun to ski, where fun has the syntactic function of adjectives such as amusing or enjoyable. The usage became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, though there is some evidence to suggest that it has 19th-century antecedents, but it can still raise eyebrows among traditionalists. The day may come when this usage is entirely unremarkable, but writers may want to avoid it in more formal contexts.



So fun can hardly be called a central adjective even though it is here conceded to have an existence as an adjective. Thus, arguments that 'funner' and 'funnest' must therefore be acceptable cannot be taken as read - 'merest' exists, but not 'merer'.


The best one can say is that some people accept funner and funnest as allowable words and others don't, that both schools have pretty good arguments on their side, and that the supporters of the usages will almost certainly come out on top in a few years.


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