Youngster

How to spell youngster

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce youngster

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does youngster mean?

1. nounA child or young person.

Youngster in a sentence

• The youngster spent the whole afternoon kicking a ball around the garden.

• Every youngster in the neighbourhood lined up for the ice cream van.

Where does youngster come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a homegrown English formation rather than a borrowing, built from the adjective 'young' and the noun suffix '-ster'. The base 'young' descends from Old English 'geong', meaning exactly what it does today, and traces back through the Germanic languages to an ancient root for vigour and freshness that also lies behind the Latin 'iuvenis' (young) and so behind 'junior' and 'juvenile'. The suffix '-ster' originally marked a doer or someone associated with an activity, seen in old words like 'spinster' (one who spins) and 'webster' (a weaver), and over time it broadened simply to mean 'a person of a certain kind'. 'Youngster' itself appears in English in the late 1500s, meaning a young person, and at sea it once specifically described a junior or apprentice sailor. The spelling is reassuringly regular for a word that sounds harder than it looks: it is just 'young' plus 'ster', with the silent 'g' inherited intact from its Old English ancestor.

How the word is built

• young (Old English geong: young)
• -ster (noun suffix denoting a person associated with something)