Stunning means so beautiful or so surprising that it almost knocks you over. A stunning view, a stunning victory, she looked stunning.
It covers beauty and shock equally: a stunning result can mean an excellent one or an astonishing one. It is one of the most overused adjectives in property advertising, where stunning has come to mean approximately fine. Note stun, the verb, which means both to astonish and to knock senseless; and stunned, which describes the person on the receiving end.
1adjectivestunningExtremely beautiful.
“The sunset over the bay was stunning.”
synonyms: gorgeous, breathtaking
2adjectiveastonishingAstonishing.
“It was a stunning result and nobody had predicted it.”
stunning is a quality of astonishing.
Also accepted in games: gorgeous, breathtaking
Middle English stonen comes from Old French estoner, to astonish — itself from a Latin word about thunder. Astonish, astound and stun are all the same verb, and all three began as being thunderstruck.
Middle English
stunnyng
English, today
stunning
From Middle English stunnyng, stunnynge, stounyng, equivalent to stun + ing.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA