Youngest

How to spell youngest

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce youngest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does youngest mean?

1. adjectiveHaving the least age of a group; the most young.

Youngest in a sentence

• The youngest child in the family still attends primary school.

• At twenty-three she was the youngest manager the firm had ever hired.

Where does youngest come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word young descends from the Old English geong, meaning 'in the early stage of life', which itself goes back to a shared Germanic root that also gave German jung and Dutch jong. The far older Indo-European ancestor meant something like 'youthful' or 'vigorous', and it is a distant relative of the Latin iuvenis, the source of words like 'junior' and 'juvenile'. The superlative ending -est has been attached to adjectives in English since the earliest records, simply marking the highest degree, so youngest literally means 'most young'. The hidden spelling trap is the silent, soft 'g' tucked between the 'n' and the ending: the word is pronounced with a 'ng' sound, yet the written form keeps that extra g from the older geong, so it ends -ngest rather than the way it sounds.

How the word is built

• young (from Old English geong: young)
• -est (superlative suffix)