Teenager

How to spell teenager

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce teenager

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does teenager mean?

1. nounA young person aged between thirteen and nineteen.

Teenager in a sentence

• Every teenager in the household wanted a later curfew.

• The survey asked how much pocket money the average teenager receives.

Where does teenager come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly modern compound, first recorded in American English in the early twentieth century and popularised in the 1940s as advertisers and educators began treating adolescents as a distinct market and social group. It is built from the word 'teenage', which simply marks the years whose names end in 'teen', that is thirteen through nineteen. The 'teen' element traces back to the Old English '-tene', a form of 'ten', the same root that gives us the ordinary numbers thirteen, fourteen and so on. To this was added the agent suffix '-er', which English uses to turn a description into a word for a person, exactly as in 'villager' or 'islander'. Because the word is a transparent compound, its spelling is regular: the only quiet trap is the silent 'a' of 'age' sitting in the middle, which writers can forget.

How the word is built

• teen (the -teen of thirteen to nineteen, from Old English -tene 'ten')
• age (period of life, from Latin via French)
• -er (noun suffix denoting a person)