Gunna

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. An informal spelling of going to, used in casual speech to express a future action or intention
2. A casual, spoken-style way of writing the phrase going to when indicating that something will happen later
3. Informal shorthand used in relaxed speech to signal that an action or event is planned or expected to occur

Etymology: "Gunna" is a spelling of "gonna", itself a contraction of "going to", so the history is mostly the history of "to" and of a pronunciation habit. The "going" part was never shortened by any deliberate step. Speakers simply ran the two words together so fast that the vowel of "going" and the "t" of "to" blurred into a single syllable, and the written form followed the speech. The surprising part is the "ng" ending. In "going", the final sound is the nasal "ng", but in casual speech it has often been pronounced as a plain "n". This pattern, known as g-dropping, has a long history in English, and it is the reason the spelling "gonna" looks the way it does. "Gunna" is a further variant, reflecting a vowel pronounced closer to the "u" in "fun" than to the "o" in "gone". The written form was first recorded in 1913, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is when the contraction began to appear in print.