stunod

The story

1. Italian · derived fromstonato“out of tune”
2. English todaystunod

Italian-American immigrant slang; dialectal and derived from Southern Italian languages. In standard Italian it would be Italian stonato (“out of tune”). However, in the first half of the 20th century, the largely Southern Italian emigrants to America did not speak the Florentine dialect that modern Standard Italian is based upon and instead used the Sicilian stunatu or the Neapolitan stunato. The Italian-American meaning is nearly identical to the meaning in Sicilian and Neapolitan, though in Sicilian and Neapolitan stunatu and stuntato can also simply mean “out of tune” as well. The word stoned (“exhilarated, intoxicated by substances”) is often theorized to be a phono-semantic matching from stunod.

Words from the same roots