Other forms: youths
Youth is the early part of life, when a person is still young. The years before responsibility arrives.
The word covers the period, so in my youth means when I was young, and it covers young people as a group, so youth unemployment and a youth club are standard. There is a third use for an individual young man, which is chiefly journalistic and faintly disapproving, since a youth in a news report is usually up to something. There is a well-known observation that youth is wasted on the young.
1nounyouthThe period of being young.~4%
“He spent his youth in a village outside Dundee.”
2nounconsideredYoung people considered as a group.~96%
“The centre runs activities for local youth.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 27 sentences found in the wild and placed 27 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Youth is young with the ending th on it. Old English ġeoguþ named the state of being young, from Proto-Germanic jugunþiz.
Proto-Germanic
*jugunþō
Proto-West Germanic
*juwunþa
Old English
ġeoguþ — the state of being young; youth
Middle English
youthe
English, today
youth
Built from
From Middle English youthe, youghte, ȝouþe, from Old English ġeoguþ (“the state of being young; youth”), from Proto-West Germanic juwunþa, from Proto-Germanic jugunþō, jugunþiz (“youth”), corresponding to young + -th. Cognate with stq Juugd, West Frisian jeugd, Dutch jeugd, German Low German Jöögd, German Jugend.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA