Youth

How to spell youth

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce youth

What does youth mean?

1. nounThe period of life when a person is young, between childhood and adulthood.
2. nounA young person, especially a young man, or young people considered as a group.

Youth in a sentence

• He spent his youth on a farm in the countryside.

• A local youth was praised for returning the lost wallet.

• Travelling widely in her youth shaped her later career.

• The council opened a new centre for the youth of the town.

Where does youth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Old English geoguth, meaning the time or condition of being young, which came from the older Germanic form jugunthi. That ancestor is closely tied to the adjective 'young' itself (Old English geong), and the two have travelled together since before English was written down. The same root surfaces in the German Jugend and the Dutch jeugd, both meaning youth, which shows how widely the Germanic family shared it. The awkward modern spelling, with its silent gh-style history and its '-th' ending, is a worn-down echo of that older 'geoguth' shape, where the soft middle consonants gradually faded over centuries. Because the '-th' suffix forms abstract nouns of quality, just as it does in 'truth', 'health', and 'warmth', youth originally named the quality of being young before it also came to mean a young person.

How the word is built

• young (root sense 'young')
• -th (noun-forming suffix denoting a state or quality)