adolescent

comparative more adolescent · superlative most adolescent

1. Of, relating to, or at the age of adolescence; at the stage between being a child and an adult.

   Schools, unless discipline were doubly strong, / Detain their adolescent charge too long.

   1785, William Cowper, Tirocinium

   1 more example

   Again, voice change is not easy and vulnerability plays a big part, but if choral teachers and adolescent singers approach it with the right mindframe, the experience can be empowering, enlightening, and restorative for all involved.

   2019, Bridget Sweet, Thinking Outside the Voice Box, page 71

plural adolescents

1. A person who is in adolescence; someone who has reached puberty but is not yet an adult.

   It may be wartime, but Miss Adolescent wants her fun!

   1944, Noel Streatfeild, Theatre Shoes

   2 more examples

   Besides, there are a great many of these accusers, and they have been accusing me now for a great many years; and what is more, they approached you at the most impressionable age, when some of you were children or adolescents; and they literally won their case by default, because there was no one to defend me.

   1954, Plato, translated by Hugh Tredennick, “Socrates on Trial: The Apology”, in The Last Days of Socrates (Penguin Classics), Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, →OCLC, page 20

   ‘A healthy adolescent might be expected to produce five hundred billion blood cells a day.’

   2014, Ian McEwan, The Children Act, Penguin Random House (2018), page 66