Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The quality or state of being adolescent or in the growing age.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The quality of being adolescent; youthfulness.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun adolescence

Etymologies

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Examples

  • And therefore doe they preferre the beloved, and verifie that the gods likewise preferre the same: and greatly blame the Poet Æschylus, who in the love betweene Achilles and Patroclus ascribeth the lovers part unto Achilles, who was in the first and beardlesse youth of his adolescency, and the fairest of the Græcians.

    Of Friendship. 1909

  • AEschylus, who in the love betweene Achilles and Patroclus ascribeth the lovers part unto Achilles, who was in the first and beardlesse youth of his adolescency, and the fairest of the Graecians.

    Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian Various 1562

  • If they are going down the wrong pathway and you don't get a hold of them during adolescency and get them straightened out, by the time they get to high school they're pretty much already set in their ways, they have already taken on a lot of their life long personality characteristics and behaviors that are going to be with them for the rest of their life and if the child doesn't like to read, if the child has not learned how to

    Oral History Interview with Robert Logan, December 28, 1990. Interview M-0027. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) 1990

  • On the contrary side I beheld many of greene adolescency of like proportion to the former, and in suchlike compasse or space, the grounds of both beautified and set foorth with an exquisite foliature or woorke of leaues and flowers, this companie was plucking and gathering of the flowers of sundrye hearbes, and tender bushing stalkes and braunches; and with them diuers faire Nimphes pleasantly deuising, and sportinglie snatching away their gathered flowers, [A] and in such sort as abouesaid vnder the figure were ingrauen certaine capitall letters, to shew this one word AMISSIO, conteyning the ninth part to the Diameter or the quadrature.

    Hypnerotomachia The Strife of Loue in a Dreame Francesco Colonna

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