means The light and warmth that reaches us from the sun, often used to describe bright, cheerful weather or, affectionately, a person who brightens a room.

from A plain Old English compound, sunne (sun) plus scinan (to shine), stitched together long before English was even written down with consistent spelling. Both halves are deeply Germanic — sunne has cousins across the old northern tongues, and scinan is related to German scheinen and the source of our verb 'shine.' The word has meant exactly what it says for well over a thousand years; the tender use for a beloved person is a much later, sweeter bloom on an ancient root.