junior
Noun pluraljuniors
Pluraljuniors
Formsjuniors, junioring, juniored
- 1Low in rank, or holding a subordinate role, job, or position.
He held a junior position in the department for several years.
Junior officers report to those above them in the chain of command.
Similarsubordinate, lower, minor
Note
Rank is the sense in which the word grades like any ordinary adjective: a more junior colleague, the most junior partner. That is worth noticing, because junior began as a Latin comparative, a contraction of iuvenior, "younger", from iuvenis, "young". Juvenile comes from the same family. The age sense usually stays ungraded.
- 2Younger, used especially to tell apart two people who share the same name.
Whenever both brothers visited, we spoke of the junior Holmes to avoid confusion.
The junior Adams entered politics decades after his elder namesake.
Similaryounger
Note
Age is measured against someone here. The word keeps its comparative force, so it takes to rather than than: Julian Barnes, in Knowing French (2011), describes a woman as "eight years junior to me". It rarely takes more or most in this sense. In titles like junior readers or junior golfers, it shades into a label for young people as a group.
- 3A name suffix placed after a son's full name when his father has the same name.
His diploma read 'Michael Brennan junior' in full.
They named the baby after his dad, so he became Samuel Reed junior.
Oppositesenior
Note
Three abbreviations compete for this suffix: Jr., Jnr. and Jun. Any of them can replace the full word after a name, as in Samuel Reed Jr. The suffix marks the son of a father with the same name, so it belongs with full names. It is not used with a first name alone.
- 4Someone in the third year of a four-year course at a high school, college, or university.
Most juniors begin preparing for college entrance exams that year.
He made the varsity team as a junior.
Note
The noun for the third-year adjective reaches a little further than the adjective does: the Philippines uses it as well as the US. A junior in this sense is a student at a stage of study, not someone younger than another person. "A junior at the state university" places a student in a year, not in an age comparison.
- 5Relating to the third academic year of a four-year high school (eleventh grade) or university.
She earned top grades throughout her junior year.
The junior curriculum introduces more advanced coursework.
Note
American schooling names its years, and this is the third of four: junior year, the junior class, in high school (eleventh grade) or college. A British reader meets the same adjective much lower down, where the primary-school sense covers young children. Context, not spelling, tells the two apart.
- 6A person who is younger than another.
He may be my junior, but he has traveled far more than I have.
The juniors looked to the older relatives for advice.
Oppositesenior
Note
The noun's favorite home is an idiom of age difference: four years his junior, some years my junior, with the gap stated first and a possessive after. P. G. Wodehouse uses it of a schoolfellow in Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939). Its opposite, senior, works the same way. In the plural, as in Angela Brazil's Monitress Merle (1922), the juniors are simply the younger group.
- 7Relating to someone younger, or to an earlier stage of a person's life.
Looking back, she found her junior ambitions rather charming.
The diary captured his junior hopes from those early years.
Note
Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1642) speaks of "our first Studies and junior Endeavours", the efforts of youth, set against what "the wisest Heads prove at last". That is the shape of this sense: the contrast is with a person's own later life, not with another, older person. It attaches to what someone hoped, tried or felt early on.
- 8Relating to a league or competition limited to players below a certain age or experience level.
She coached a junior soccer squad for three seasons.
The junior division has stricter age limits than the open category.
Oppositesenior
Note
This is a sporting label in the US and Canada: junior hockey, a junior league, a junior division. The cutoff can be age or experience, so a junior competition is not necessarily a children's one. It stands against senior or open categories, and the word usually comes directly before the name of the sport or the league.
- 9A range of clothing sizes cut for girls and younger women.
Most of the tops on that rack come in junior sizes.
She typically wears a junior rather than a misses' size.
- 10A barrister of junior rank, especially one assisting a senior barrister on a case.
She worked as a junior on several high-profile trials.
The leading counsel relied on his junior to cross-check the evidence.
Note
At the Bar, rank is a matter of title, not age. A junior is any barrister who has not taken silk, however long in practice, and the word is often used of the one who supports a leading counsel. The verb to junior a case grows out of this courtroom use.
- 11Relating to the latter half of primary school education.
He teaches the junior years at the village school.
The junior curriculum builds on what children learn as infants.
Note
Schools in Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth divide primary education in two, and junior names the later half. Its partner word is infant: Maurice Galton and Helen Patrick, writing in 2018 on small primary schools, describe different closing times "for their infant and junior children". The same split gives the noun for a pupil at this stage.
- 12An older primary-school pupil, whether in the upper years of a primary school or at a separate junior school.
She teaches the juniors in the mornings and the infants after lunch.
As a junior, he walked to the bigger classrooms each day.
Note
The pupil-noun belongs to schools that divide children into infants and juniors. Michelle MacGrath's The Art of Peaceful Teaching in the Primary School (2013) describes a son who is "now a junior at another, bigger school". An American might say the same words about a third-year student, which is why the setting matters.
- 13To work in a junior role on a task, project, or case.
Trainees junior on major matters before leading their own.
He was happy to junior on the deal and watch how the partners worked.
Similarassist
Oppositelead
Note
A verb that works with or without an object: one juniors a trial, or simply juniors on a matter. In Mick Lowe's Conspiracy of Brothers (2013), Greenspan "had juniored the Demeter murder trial". Rainier George Weiner's Living on Lifesavers (2016) takes it into a dance studio, where a manager "could dance just enough to do some junioring". It inflects regularly: juniored, junioring.
- 14To have more advanced students, known as juniors, assist in instructing beginners.
The studio juniors its beginners, pairing each one with a brown belt for the first weeks of class.
With forty newcomers enrolled, the chief instructor chose to junior the beginners rather than hire extra staff.
Note
A teaching term from Kenpo, the martial art, where the verb's object is the beginner rather than the helper: an instructor juniors a newcomer by assigning a more advanced student to help. Jim and Leann Rathbone's James Mitose and the Path of Kenpo (2006) still flags junioring as a term of art. Keep it apart from working in a junior role, where the junior is the subject.
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Origin
Borrowed from Latin junior, a contraction of iuvenior ("younger"), the comparative of iuvenis ("young"); related to juvenile.