youth
noun
Simple meaning
The time of life between childhood and maturity.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
yoothIPA pronunciation (US)
ˈjuθ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
A young person (especially a young man or boy)
The time of life between childhood and maturity
uncountable
The part of life following childhood; the period of existence preceding maturity or age; the whole early part of life, from childhood, or, sometimes, from infancy, to adulthood.
countable
A young man; a male adolescent or young adult.
uncountable
The quality or state of being young.
The freshness and vitality characteristic of a young person
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- A2 · Elementary
- Frequency
- Very Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: The time of life between childhood and maturity
Used this way, youth is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Young adults (a generational unit) considered as a cultural class or subculture.
A gang whose members are teenagers.
Inexpensive supervised lodging (especially for youths on bicycling trips).
Political or religious or social reform movement or agitation consisting chiefly of young people.
Vigorous perennial herb with flowers in erect racemes and having young plants develop at the junction of a leaf blade and the leafstalk.
A minority youth culture whose distinctiveness depended largely on the social class and ethnic background of its members.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.