Other forms: younger, youngest
Young means you have not been alive very long. A young dog chewing the furniture, a young teacher on her first morning, apple trees planted last spring.
It is one of the short adjectives that take -er and -est: younger, youngest, never more young. The young, with the, means young people as a group — the young and the old alike. An animal's babies are its young: a bird feeds its young. Watch the tone of young man and young lady, which is what an adult says just before telling a child off. The noun is youth, meaning both the time of life and a young person, and a youngster is a child. Young at heart describes someone old who has not gone stiff about anything.
1adjectiveyoungHaving lived or existed for only a short time.~82%
“The company is young, but it already has forty staff.”
synonyms: youthful
2nounoffspringThe offspring of an animal.~16%
“The fox carried food back to her young twice a night.”
3nounconsideredYoung people considered as a group.~2%
“The scheme is aimed at the young and costs them nothing.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Young reaches straight back through Old English ġeong and Proto-Germanic *jungaz to a Proto-Indo-European word *h₂yuh₁en- that already meant young. Dutch jong, German jung and Icelandic ungur are the same word in different spellings. Gothic, written down in the fourth century, has juggs — the vowel has wandered, the meaning has not moved an inch.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂ey-
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂yuHn̥ḱós
Proto-Germanic
*jungaz
Proto-West Germanic
*jung
Old English
ġeong
Middle English
yong
English, today
young
Built from
Inherited from Middle English yong, yonge, from Old English ġeong, from Proto-West Germanic jung, from Proto-Germanic jungaz, from Proto-Indo-European h₂yuHn̥ḱós, from h₂yuh₁en- (“young”). 2 Cognate with gsw jung, jungu, junhs, jungà, jòng (“young”), bar junk (“young”), gmw-cfr -, lb jonk (“young”), cim djung, jung, junk (“young”), Dutch jong (“young”), German -, German Low German -, mhn - and wym jung (“young”), li jong, jonk (“young”), Yiddish יונג (“young”), Danish -, Norwegian Bokmål -, Norwegian Nynorsk - and Swedish ung (“young”), Faroese -, Icelandic ungur (“young”), Gothic 𐌾𐌿𐌲𐌲𐍃 (“young”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA