fun [L17th] The earliest sense of this surprisingly recent word is ‘trick’ or ‘hoax’. It seems to come ultimately from a dialect pronunciation of Middle English fon ‘a fool’ (see fond). Our current sense dates only from the 18th century, and in 1755 Dr Johnson described it disapprovingly as ‘a low cant [slang] word’. He would probably have sympathized with the view given in the humorist A. P. Herbert’s Uncommon Law (1935): ‘People must not have fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.’ Things can be funny [M18th] in several different ways. The expressions funny ha-ha and funny peculiar, encapsulating the distinctions in meaning between what is amusing and what is strange, were coined by the writer Ian Hay in his novel The Housemaster (1936). Funny meaning ‘strange’ is late 18th century, while the ‘comical’ sense is mid 18th century. Funny money dates from the 1900s when it was used in the US for forged money.