adjective
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full of or exposed to sunlight
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radiating good humour
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of or resembling the sun
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of sunny
Explanation
Sunny means shining with bright sunlight, like a beautiful sunny Saturday at the beach. It can also mean cheerful, like your sunny, upbeat best friend. When the sun is shining, it's a sunny day, and when you're smiling and friendly, you're sunny too. Sunny has been used in this figurative way since the 16th century, and in the 1830s, sunny side came to mean "optimistic outlook." However, if you order your eggs sunny side up, it just means you'll get two fried eggs with bright yellow, runny yolks.
Vocabulary lists containing sunny
Florida's B.E.S.T. Common Suffixes: -y
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Spelling Practice 1, Unit 6
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Meanwhile, the cloud that has been lurking across southern Scotland and Northern Ireland should clear and whilst not as hot it will at least be sunny.
From BBC • May 22, 2026
“It was a beautiful, hot, sunny day,” Ayers told the Guardian in 2017, “And I just got this phrase in my head: ‘Everybody loves the sunshine.’
From Los Angeles Times • May 19, 2026
The quality, he says over a bottle of San Pellegrino at a coffee shop in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant on a sunny April afternoon, is “subconscious.”
From Salon • May 15, 2026
As seems appropriate, it takes both a dark and a sunny view of youth.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 14, 2026
And the lacquer made every piece glimmer like still water on a sunny day.
From "Hope Springs" by Jaime Berry
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
