A serious question to start with, how would you define fun? I am not asking you to describe what fun means but to define the word. It isn’t easy. Most people begin by explaining things we think of as fun activities or maybe even people. Their answers reflect their own experience of fun.

If you struggle to define fun, you are not alone; even academics specialising in researching fun have found it difficult to explain what they mean by ‘fun’. It is so tricky that many researchers have ignored the definition and lumped fun into other words. It doesn’t help either that, like many words in English, fun has changed its meaning over the last few hundred years, and I will argue it has come full circle back to its original purpose.

When I first started looking at the history of using the word ‘fun’ in English, it was like a light switching on for my research. First, we will never be able to pinpoint the first time anyone used the word fun or what they meant by it. All we can do is look at the written records of a word. The first recorded of fun seems to have been in 1440.

Regarding earth-shattering events (in Europe at least), 1440 seems to have been a bit of a non-starter, with the notable exception of having a new king of Denmark or the death of the (alleged) serial child-killer, Gilles de Rais, in France. However, more important, in 1440, we find the first recorded use of the Anglo-Saxon word ‘fon‘ from which we get (one origin) for our word fun. Fon is used to explain foolish behaviour – how people become foolish or how they are made to look foolish.

A century later, the meaning of fon was changed to refer to people being toyed with. By 1685 (a much more exciting year for British history as it was the year James Stuart became James II of England and we had the Monmouth Rebellion), fon had transformed into fun. But, importantly, fun was being used to describe how people were being used as the playthings of others, namely, criminals! Fun explained how people were cheated and tricked by confidence tricksters. The great Dr Johnson, in 1755, dismissed fun as a ‘low cant’ word, meaning it was only to be used by the lower classes! However, Johnson suggested that fun was evolving and could be used to describe merriment and ‘frolicksome delight’. I suppose such merriment and frolicksomeness would only be had with the lower classes.

It’s important because the early definitions of fun reflected how fun was used to cheat people. Just think of how we use fun today. Of course, we talk about fun in terms of pleasurable activities, events or people, but we can also fool ourselves into believing that having fun is the most crucial thing in our lives. And that is without saying anything about how fun is used by employers, advertisers or even governments to control our behaviour – and that is why I think we have returned to the original meaning of fun!

In the next post, I will explore a very different origin of the word ‘fun’.