| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| adolescent |
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| SYLLABICATION: | ad·o·les·cent |
| PRONUNCIATION: |   d l- s  nt |
| ADJECTIVE: | 1. Of, relating to, or undergoing adolescence. See synonyms at young. 2. Characteristic of adolescence; immature: an adolescent sense of humor. | | NOUN: | A young person who has undergone puberty but who has not reached full maturity; a teenager. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Middle English, from Old French, from Latin adol scns, adolscent-, present participle of adolscere, to grow up : ad-, ad- + alscere, to grow, inchoative of alere, to nourish; see al-2 in Appendix I. | | WORD HISTORY: | The adolescent grows up to become the adult. The words adolescent and adult ultimately come from forms of the same Latin word, adolscere, meaning “to grow up.” The present participle of adolscere, adolscns, from which adolescent derives, means “growing up,” while the past participle adultus, the source of adult, means “grown up.” Appropriately enough, adolescent, first recorded in English in a work written perhaps in 1440, seems to have come into the language before adult, first recorded in a work published in 1531.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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