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I am not a native speaker of English. I came across many articles which used the phrase "pun intended". In many cases I am not able to grasp the meaning of the sentence as what this phrase mean in the context. For example,
Behavioural experts say it is not just the wiring that causes the ‘differences’ (pun intended).
I am totally clueless about what the meaning of the phrase inside the braces is. What does it mean?
Pun intended means that the joke was a deliberate one.
A pun is a play with a word, e.g. "You can tune a guitar, but you can't tuna fish."
Sometimes authors accidentally do this; that is, they did not mean to play with a word, but a reader can interpret the author's work as a pun.
However, here, it is specifically stating that this pun was intended, or deliberate.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned that the phrase "pun intended" is a form of wordplay itself:
As others have commented, a pun is a play on words, usually using words that sound the same or similar to give multiple meanings to a phrase.
Sometimes when writing or speaking it is hard or unavoidable to use a phrase that creates such a double meaning - potentially obscuring the speaker's point and/or making it seem like they are joking. In this situation it is common for people to say
(No pun intended)
This, I believe, is the original phrase.
Playing on this, some people occasionally reverse the phrase by removing the negative:
pun intended
to make it clear to the listener that yes, they are using wordplay to make their point.
(Interestingly Google has ~11 million hits for "pun intended", but ~21 million for no pun intended, even though every page that contains "no pun intended" must contain "pun intended"!)
"Pun intended" literally means "There is a pun (a play on words) in this sentence, and I put it in intentionally." This distinguishes it from unintentional puns, where the writer didn't mean to put it whatever double-meaning is there.
Unfortunately the example sentence you give doesn't have enough context for us to tell what the pun is; I would guess that either "wiring" or "differences" is used in a slightly different way in the previous sentences.
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect.
Pun intended probably is used to indicate that the ambiguous phrase was intentional.
Of course, as many have explained, "pun intended" means that the pun is deliberate: can't argue with that!
However I think that in many cases the author slyly draws our attention to the fact that there is a pun, which might otherwise have escaped us readers.
Anyway, it often happens to me that I only notice a pun because of this kind of remark, in English of course, but even in my native language, French.
It means that the person has noticed a potential pun(humorous play on words) in what they have said or written and they want people to know that it was intended.
