PUN  , a

play upon words, particularly the use of a word in two or more different applications or of two or more words similar in sound but with different meanings by which a humorous or ludicrous effect is produced; thus Charles I.'s Court Jester is said to have made the punning grace " great praise be to God and little Laud to the devil " for which the archbishop dismissed him from his service . Another famous pun was that upon The Beggar's Opera, which " made Gay rich and Rich gay." Thomas Hood was the king of pun-makers . " They went and told the sexton, and the sexton toll'd the bell " (" Sally Brown "1 is one example among the innumerable puns with which his poems are filled . The derivation of the word is not known . It first appears in the second half of the 1 7th century . Skeat (Etym . Did., 1898) identifies it with an obsolete and dialectal variant of " pound," to beat in the sense of " to pound words, to beat them into new senses, to hammer at forced similes" The New English Dictionary considers it was probably one of the shortened words, like " mob," " cit," &c., which were common in slang after the Restoration . In R . L'Estrange, Counsellor Manners's Last Legacy (1676), " pun " is found with punnet, pundigrion and quibble, " of which fifteen will not make up one single jest." Possibly these may be all referred to " punctilio" (It. puntiglio, dim. of punto, point, Lat. punctum), a small, fine point, a cavil or quibble . No historical connexion, however, has been found between the words .