teen
Pluralteens
Pluralteens
- 1A teenager; a person between 13 and 19 years old.
As a teen, she delivered newspapers every morning before school.
The library added a reading room designed just for teens.
Similarteenager
Note
A clipping of teenager: the longer word cut down, not a new coinage. It has no family tie to the archaic word for grief, which comes from Old English tēona; the two only share a spelling. The short form is at home even in official prose, as when an NTSB safety alert tells parents how to protect their teens. Its plural is the regular teens.
- 2Having to do with teenagers or the teenage years; teenage.
The network launched a new teen drama this fall.
Teen fashion tends to change faster than adult styles.
Similarteenage, adolescent
Oppositeadult
Note
An adjective with no degrees: nothing is more teen or most teen. It stands in front of its noun, as in teen fashion or the teen drivers of a 2024 NTSB report, and does the same work as teenage. Because it is the clipped noun put to work before another noun, a phrase like teen drivers can be read either way. The meaning is the same whichever way you read it.
- 3Grief, sorrow, or trouble; suffering that weighs upon a person.
The widow sat in teen by the cold hearth, refusing all comfort.
With public toil and private teen Thou sank'st alone.
1867, Matthew Arnold, A Southern NightNote
A poet's word for sorrow, from Old English tēona, and long since archaic. It works as a mass noun, often coupled with a plainer synonym: Fairfax's Soldan changes hue "for grief and teen," and Shakespeare's Miranda grieves for "the teen that I have turned you to." Swinburne still reached for it in 1866 ("her times of teen"). Use it only where deliberately old-fashioned verse is the aim.
- 4Vexation, anger, or hatred.
The old baron nursed his teen against the family that had wronged him.
Full of teen, she tore the letter to pieces and cast it into the fire.
Note
The same Old English noun tēona as the grief sense, turned outward. Here the trouble is felt toward someone else as anger or hatred, rather than endured as sorrow. It is archaic at best and often simply obsolete. In modern writing it belongs only in historical pastiche, where context must make clear that the teen meant is rage, not sadness.
- 5To excite or provoke someone; to vex, afflict, or injure.
His mocking words teened her beyond all patience.
They sought to teen their enemy with constant raids on his lands.
Note
A verb with its own line of descent: Old English tēonian or tȳnan, "to vex, annoy, provoke." That second spelling hides a trap. An unrelated Old English tȳnan meant "to fence in" and lies behind the enclosing verb. This one is transitive and needs an object, which is the thing provoked or injured. It is fully obsolete and conjugates regularly: teened, teening.
- 6To become angry or distressed.
Þenne tened hym theologye · whan he þis tale herde
c. 1385, William Langland, Piers PlowmanNote
The same obsolete verb turned back on its subject, so that the reflexive pronoun carries the meaning. In Langland's Piers Plowman (c. 1385), "Þenne tened hym theologye" means that Theology grew angry. Read literally, he vexed himself, with hym serving where later English would put himself. Without the reflexive pronoun, the line would read as Theology provoking someone else.
- 7To close or shut; to enclose a piece of land with a hedge or fence.
Each autumn the men teened the meadows against wandering cattle.
He paid two laborers to teen the new pasture with hawthorn.
Note
A Devon dialect verb from Old English tȳnan, "to fence, enclose," built on the Germanic word for an enclosure that also gave English town. It is a doublet of tine and a cousin of German zäunen. A 1919 report found older Devon speakers still saying "Teen the door, will 'e?" Eden Phillpotts stretches it further in Redcliff (1924), where a character teened the candle and so put it out.
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Practice
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Origins
A clipping of "teenager."
From Middle English tene, from Old English tēona (also tēone), going back to Proto-West Germanic *teun and Proto-Germanic *teuną.
From Middle English tenen, from Old English tēonian or tȳnan ("to vex, annoy, provoke"), going back to Proto-West Germanic *tiunijan and Proto-Germanic *tiunijaną.
From Middle English tenen (also tinen), from Old English tȳnan ("to fence, inclose, shut, close"), from Proto-West Germanic *tūnijan and ultimately Proto-Germanic *tūną ("fence, enclosure"). It is a doublet of "tine," is related to "town," and is cognate with Dutch tuinen and German zäunen.