A stripling is a boy just beginning to grow into a man. Tall, thin, and not filled out yet.
The word is thoroughly archaic and survives almost entirely in historical fiction and in deliberate joking, as in a mere stripling of nineteen. It is affectionate rather than insulting. The image is of somebody as narrow as a strip, which is where the word comes from. English has largely replaced it with youth, lad and teenager, none of which carries quite the same picture of gangling thinness.
1nounstriplingA boy or young man not yet grown to full size.
“He was a stripling of sixteen when he first went to sea.”
A stripling is a little strip. The word is probably strip with a diminutive ending, a young man thought of as thin and not yet filled out.
Proto-Indo-European
*strew-
Proto-Germanic
*straupijaną — to strip; to pluck; to wipe
Proto-West Germanic
*straupijan
Old English
*strēpan
Middle English
stripling — an adolescent, a youth (specifically one who is male); a child
English, today
stripling
Built from
From Middle English stripling (“an adolescent, a youth (specifically one who is male); a child”)strepelynge, stripeling, striplyng, strippelinge, stryplynge, possibly from strepen (“to remove the clothes of, undress, strip; to peel off; to skin (an animal); to remove; to take something away from someone; to plunder, rob”) (connoting something that is stripped and thin, and yet to reach its full size) + -ling. Strepen is derived from Old English strēpan Anglian, strīepan, strīpan, strȳpan West Saxon, from Proto-West Germanic straupijan, from Proto-Germanic straupijaną (“to strip; to pluck; to wipe”), from streupaną (“to touch”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European strew-, sterw-, ster- (“a strip; a streak; a beam, ray”)) + -janą. The English word is analysable as strip + ling.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA