Teens

How to spell teens

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce teens

What does teens mean?

1. nounThe years of a person's life from thirteen to nineteen, or numbers within that range.

Teens in a sentence

• Both of her children are now in their teens.

• The temperature dropped into the low teens overnight.

Where does teens come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word teens grows out of the suffix -teen, which appears at the end of the English numbers thirteen through nineteen and comes from Old English -tene or -tiene, an inflected form of ten. That suffix literally meant 'and ten', so 'thirteen' was understood as 'three and ten'. By the seventeenth century English speakers began grouping these particular ages together and calling them collectively 'the teens', and from there the plural noun came to mean both the years of someone's adolescence and, more loosely, any quantities falling between thirteen and nineteen. The same -ten root sits inside 'ten' itself and inside the related word 'teenager', coined much later in the twentieth century. Because the spelling simply doubles the long 'ee' of -teen, the only trap is remembering the silent middle: it is t-e-e-n-s, not the phonetic 'teans'.

How the word is built

• teen (from -teen, the number suffix meaning 'plus ten')
• -s (plural)