stripling
See also: Stripling
English
Etymology
From strip (“long, narrow piece”) + -ling.
Pronunciation
Noun
stripling (plural striplings)
- A youth in the state of adolescence, or just passing from boyhood to manhood; a lad. [from 14thc.].
- Template:RQ:Authorized Version
- 1749, John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure:
- Figure to yourself, Madam, a fair stripling, between eighteen and nineteen, with his head reclin'd on one of the sides of the chair, his hair in disorder'd curls, irregularly shading a face on which all the roseate bloom of youth and all the manly graces conspired to fix my eyes and heart. Even the languor and paleness of his face, in which the momentary triumph of the lily over the rose was owing to the excesses of the night, gave an inexpressible sweetness to the finest features imaginable
- 1837, "Venator", The Warwickshire Hunt from 1795 to 1836, Prefatory Remarks:
- This is the sort of witchery, not easily defined—but, by its votaries, pretty sensibly felt, in hunting the fox. The light-hearted, high-spirited stripling, when cigaring it careless to cover, with a kind of a knowing demi-devil-may-care twist of his beaver, receives in his transit a benison from every real friend of the chase he may chance to pass; and the airy, eager zeal of the youthful aspirant to rolls, tumbles, and the brush, will flush his memory with the frolic gayety of other days, and animate his mind with reflections most welcome to his heart.
- 1879: Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, Chapter 6:
- For there, upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a mediaeval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs.
- 1927-29, M.K. Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, translated 1940 by Mahadev Desai, Part I, Chapter xii:
- A berth was reserved for me by my friends in the same cabin as that of Sergt. Tryambakrai Mazmudar, the Junagadh vakil. They also commended me to him. He was an experienced man of mature age and knew the world. I was yet a stripling of eighteen without any experience of the world. Sergt. Mazmudar told my friends not to worry about me.
Translations
male adolescent
|
Further reading
- “stripling”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
- Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “stripling”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.