Hun

Hun can be a term of endearment, a phonetic spelling from a shortening of honey.

It’s also used as a derogatory slang term for women involved in multi-level marketing.

The slang hun (from honey as an affectionate or familiar term of address) comes from a stereotype about women who work in multi-level marketing (MLM). The stereotype is that these women flatter people, or try to sound folksy, when attempting to make a sale or attract a new recruit, but becoming nasty upon resistance or rejection. For instance: Hey, hun, this could be your opportunity to make millions. Hun, as an affectionate term of address in a place of a specific name, also allows for quickly creating marketing messages in emails or on social media.

In MLM, salespersons have to work their networks to get new recruits and sales. But MLMs are popularly seen as pyramid schemes, and MLM workers as bombarding their friends and family about “exciting new business opportunities.” The stereotypically spammy nature of these messages earned these huns the additional nickname: hunbot on online forums like Reddit, a reference to the programmed language of chatbots or spambots.

Hun spread online in the mid-2010s, when MLM became more commonplace on social media, especially in Facebook groups among some young, stay-at-home moms, the type imagined to use a chummy hun.

Unrelated meanings of hun include the fearsome 5th-century Asiatic nomads, the Huns, notably Attila; the Irish Catholic slur hun for a Northern Irish Protestant; and the derogatory slang hun for a German, especially a German soldier during World War I and II.

People who oppose MLM—in particular ex-participants who felt taken advantage of—are the ones who most frequently use the terms hun and hunbot. Active MLM workers generally find hun offensive; they prefer to think of themselves as entrepreneurs.

More examples of hun:

I had been ‘hunzoned’; lulled into a false sense of security with someone who purported to be interested in me as a person, but was actually just trying to recruit me into their multi-level marketing scheme.
—Jessica Lindsay, Metro, July 2019

“ … MLM sellers, or huns, trying to capitalize on people’s greatest tragedies and heartbreaks in the most crass, opportunistic, and grotesque ways. Below, for example, a hun shills her CBD oil as a cure for PTSD by piggybacking off of Memorial Day.”
—Cassidy McGillicuddy, Patheos, May 2019

This content is not meant to be a formal definition of this term. Rather, it is an informal summary that seeks to provide supplemental information and context important to know or keep in mind about the term’s history, meaning, and usage.