Meanings
- not comparableslangStupid or crazy; out of touch with reality.
If I was acting particularly spacey, my mother would ask, “Are you stunod?”
2000 Christmas, “Are you stunod?”, in Primo, volume 1, number 2, page 272 more examples
“Do you understand me? Are you stunod?” my mother would say. Stunod. Someone who is out-of-it, spacey, not a practical person who knows that life is labor and that only the sturdy can get the job done.
2000, Maria Laurino, Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America, W.W. Norton“The stunod commander, a German Commodore no less, decides that there's just too many ships in the Gulf, and he doesn't have the manpower to search everyone of them.”
2010 August 3, Bob Fingerman, Pariah, Tor, →ISBN, →OL
plural stunods
- derogatoryslangA stupid or crazy person.
That stunod never calls me unless I'm late with his tuition.
2011 February 15, Lou Scorziello, My Brother's Keeper, Xlibris, →ISBN, →LCCN3 more examples
“Hey, stunod,” Gina interjected angrily. “Help the lady.”
2002, Patricia MacDonald, Not Guilty, Pocket Books, →OL“Fuck me,” Eddie growled, cursing himself for the stunod that he was.
2010, Bob Fingerman, Pariah, Tor, →ISBN, page 205I don’t even know why you wanna work for that little stunad.
2022 June 23, Christopher Storer, “Hands”, in Christopher Storer, director, The Bear, season 1, episode 2, spoken by Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), via FX on Hulu
Origin
- Italianstonato“out of tune”
- Englishstunod
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.
More words from Italian
Full word history & related roots →Translations
Finnish tärähtänyt, tolvana
- tärähtänytstupid
- tolvanastupid person
Rhymes & wordplay
Anagrams
Cite this entry
stunod. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/stunod
“stunod.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/stunod. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “stunod,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/stunod.
Source: stunod on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.