childish

comparative more childish · superlative most childish

1. Immature in thought or behaviour.

   Your childish temper tantrums are not going to change my decision on this matter.

   1 more example

   Other instances of primitive thought are the childish belief that science in the future will be able 'objectively' to predict the date of social revolutions in the light of technological development, or the 'scientific law' that people write books, or baseless fantasies on the origin of religion, etc.

   1978 [1976], Leszek Kołakowski, translated by P[aul] S[teven] Falla, Main Currents of Marxism, volume III: The Breakdown, Oxford: Clarendon Press, translation of Główne nurty marksizmu: rozkład (in Polish), →ISBN, →OCLC, page 61

   Synonyms: infantile

2. Suitable for or expected of a child.

   This game is very childish.

   2 more examples

   She remembered, too, when, after a long childish illness, her father had carried her in his arms to the garden, […]

   1824, Susan Ferrier, The Inheritance, page 130

   As I walked to and fro daily between Southwark and Blackfriars, and lounged about at meal-times in obscure streets, the stones of which may, for anything I know, be worn at this moment by my childish feet, I wonder how many of these people were wanting in the crowd that used to come filing before me in review again, to the echo of Captain Hopkins’s voice!

   1849 May – 1850 November, Charles Dickens, The Personal History of David Copperfield, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC

   Synonyms: childly