Teen
nounA young person aged between thirteen and nineteen.
How to spell teen
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce teen
What does teen mean?
- nounA young person aged between thirteen and nineteen.
- adjectiveRelating to or intended for people in their teenage years.
Teen in a sentence
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noun
The film was made to appeal to the average teen.
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adjective
The magazine covers teen fashion and music trends.
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noun
As a teen, she spent every weekend at the local swimming pool.
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adjective
She writes a popular teen drama series for streaming services.
Where does teen come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The modern word teen, meaning a young person between thirteen and nineteen, is a clipped form of teenager, which itself grew out of the numeral ending -teen. That ending traces back to the Old English -tene or -tiene, a form closely related to ten, used to build thirteen, fourteen and so on up to nineteen. Because those exact numbers mark the years of adolescence, English speakers began in the early twentieth century to call that age group the teen years and then teenagers, with teen emerging as the short, everyday label. There is an unrelated and now largely vanished older word teen, from Old English teona, meaning grief, injury or harm, which survives only in poetry and in the phrase teen and tray. The numeral sense is the one that produced the familiar word, and its simple, regular spelling rarely causes trouble.
How the word is built
- teen (from -teen, the numeral ending of thirteen through nineteen, marking the teenage years)
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