Funner
"Funner is not a word." Or so they say.
When learning a foreign language, it is common to lack the right words to express an idea directly. The solution, as my high school German teacher put it, is circumlocution—using words you do know to express the same idea indirectly. (See this old blog post I wrote back in high school, for example.) After all, the foremost priority when using language is to be understood. Eloquence, succinctness, originality? Admirable goals, to be sure, but they are impossible to accomplish without first making sure that your interlocutor understands you. When you are lost in a country far from home, there is no way to get anywhere without being understood.
That is part of why it has become a pet peeve of mine whenever someone—usually a K-12 English teacher—implies that someone should feel embarrassed or ashamed for using the words funner and funnest in everyday speech on the basis that they are not actually real words.
Firstly, they are wrong. The Oxford English Dictionary entry for the adjective fun includes historical examples of published media using funner and funnest. According to this analysis published on the website of the Merriam-Webster dictionary (last updated June 24, 2025), "funner and funnest are definitely real words, and have been in use for over a century." The analysis does mention that the Merriam-Webster dictionary adds an annotation to its fun definition—"sometimes funner; sometimes funnest"—however, Merriam-Webster's analysis points out that there have been records of published media using funner and funnest going back, for example, to an 1881 piece in The Boston Globe.
All right, I can hear the objection of my English teachers already: just because some people do use the word doesn't mean it is correct to use the word. And to that I ask: why do you think that? If I say, "I think reading books is funner than watching movies," isn't the meaning of my sentence perfectly understandable? Why, then, should it be wrong to use the word funner? Yes, it may be less common than saying more fun, but simply being less common doesn't make it improper. If the goal of language is to be understood, then doesn't funner accomplish that job perfectly?
This argument is part of a broader conflict between linguistic prescriptivism and linguistic descriptivism. According to linguistic prescriptivists, there exist rules within a language which define what the "proper" way to use it should be. Most K-12 English teachers are essentially linguistic prescriptivists: their job is to teach you how to write effectively, and it makes their job easier if they can refer to a standardized ruleset dictating the "correct" way to write. In some countries, the government even gets involved. In 1996, the German government promulgated the German orthography reform, which attempted to simplify the written form of the language to make it easier to learn; it was met with much controversy. Throughout the late twentieth century, the Chinese government also made a large effort to standardize and simplify the Chinese language, with the goal of improving literacy rates. Today, the Chinese government promulgates a standardized set of Chinese characters which are legally recognized as standard Chinese. In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the dystopian totalitarian government of Oceania is in the process of promulgating a new language called "Newspeak"; the rules of that language make it impossible even to construct a sentence that goes against the government's authoritarian ideologies. This represents the extreme of linguistic prescriptivism: when the government is prescribing the rules of your language with the force of law.
The opposite is linguistic descriptivism, which is about taking a step back and simply observing how language is actually used in reality. All members of the linguistics field of academia are essentially linguistic descriptivists. They don't care about right or wrong: what matters is describing from an objective lens how human beings speak to each other and how that language can evolve over time.
One key danger of prescriptivism is that it may reinforce social divisions between groups of people. For example, in the United States, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a commonly spoken linguistic variety of the English language. Despite that, according to this analysis published on the EBSCO research database:
Even though AAVE follows specific linguistic rules and has a particular style, it has been stigmatized, most likely because of racial stigmatization in the United States. Many Americans, including many Black Americans, view AAVE as slang or as being inferior to standard English. Studies indicate that people who use AAVE may have more negative outcomes in school and in the workplace. Many researchers believe that these negative outcomes are due in large part to much of American society having a negative view of AAVE.
It is easy to imagine the reasons for this stigma. As kids using AAVE grow up, they may be told at school that it is wrong or incorrect to use linguistic structures that differ from the more common varieties of English grammar and vocabulary. However, my objection to this is the same as my defense of funner: if it can be understood, then why exactly is it wrong to use? In college, many of the linguistics professors I interacted with lamented the absence of academic linguistics from the K-12 curriculum, as it would provide a descriptivist counter to the prescriptivist culture there.
To be clear, I am not arguing that prescriptivism should have no place in language. In formal writing, where it is critical to be crystal clear about what you mean to say, I agree that we should fall back to the English style guides promulgated by our K-12 English teachers. I consider "formal writing" to include contexts like legislators writing the text of laws, lawyers writing briefs to submit to a court, students writing academic papers, and scientists writing research reports to submit for peer review. In these contexts, the risks associated with being misunderstood outweigh the usual dangers posed by linguistic prescriptivism.
For lawmakers, even a single ambiguous word can have tremendous unintended consequences. For example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal for an employer to fire someone on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin". The lawmakers that drafted this language probably did not intend for this to include sexual orientation or gender identity (after all, laws criminalizing same-sex sexual activity were still prevalent in 1964). However, according to the awesome Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020), because Congress decided to use the word "sex" in the statute, and because discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity necessarily involves discriminating on the basis of "sex" to some extent, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does in fact protect employees from being fired merely for being gay or transgender. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the 6–3 majority opinion:
Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. Likely, they weren’t thinking about many of the Act’s consequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.
See slip op. at 2. I bring up the Bostock decision to emphasize that there are indeed contexts in which it is important to be precise with language, and falling back to linguistic prescriptivism is sometimes required. In the case of the Civil Rights Act, we were fortunate that the unintended consequence of lawmakers' imprecise language in 1964 yielded such a desirable result as protecting the civil liberties of LGBTQ employees, but who knows if we will continue to be this fortunate in the future.
In everyday speech and writing, however, go ahead! Use funner. One of the most memorable books I read in elementary school was Frindle by Andrew Clements. In the book, the main character gets in trouble with his English teacher, who assigns him to write an essay on how words get added to the dictionary. His English teacher initially adopts a prescriptivist attitude: the dictionary is the ultimate source of truth both on the meaning of words and on what words exist. However, through his research for the essay, our hero learns that the people who write dictionaries are in fact linguistic descriptivists: words get added to the dictionary simply whenever a lot of people start to use them. In the book, he invents the word frindle as an alternative word for pen, and this essentially goes viral, becoming a nationwide trend, to the extent that the story's epilogue concludes with frindle being added to the dictionary. I love this story because it drives at the heart of the funner debate. In an ideal world, we would never be pretentious enough to shame someone merely for speaking differently than us. If the goal of speaking is to be understood, then the goal of listening should be to understand. Studying language is funner when we give it the opportunity to evolve.