Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A preadolescent boy or girl.

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

  • adjective Below the age of a teenager, younger than thirteen years old.
  • noun A person younger than a teenager, a child younger than thirteen years old.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

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Examples

  • As a subteen around the same time as he took the above as “an article of faith” , I certainly developed a much more nuanced view thanks to the liberal Irish nuns responsible for my moral and political upbringing.

    David Mamet resolves dissonance | The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D. 2008

  • Today these two images have morphed into the figure of the child soldier, a gun-toting subteen with wraparound shades and a threatening demeanor, a child who is clearly not on his way to school.

    Children in Arms Ryle, John 1999

  • Meanwhile, in another flashback subplot that's intercut with Jerry's madcap baby-murder adventure, George has a wacky new job again; this one is judging beauty contests for subteen girls.

    Quirky Jerry Seinfeld Guilty in Nanny Murder? 1998

  • But after a promising start, it partly may be the resurgent series 'slide toward juvenility and direct aim at subteen audiences that robs Tomlin's role of its potential, as Clouseau is prevented from doing or saying much that is truly outrageous to provoke the woman's schoolmarmish wrath.

    Variety.com 2009

  • Half a century before Skip Henderson’s package arrived at my door, before the word holocaust was spelled with a capital H, my subteen friends and I, growing up in the “fresh air zone” of Flushing, Queens, knew the lampshade was a bad thing, not that any of us thought about it very much.

    The Lampshade Mark Jacobson 2010

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