adultescent

English

Etymology

Blend of adult +‎ adolescent.

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -ɛsənt

Noun

adultescent (plural adultescents)

1. An adult who continues to participate in and enjoy youth culture.
   • 1996, Precision Marketing 17 June 21/4 Consider the importance of adultescents to the music biz—they make up over a third of the audience at gigs, but have more cash to spend than teenagers.
   • 2001, Andrew Calcutt, Brit Cult: An A-Z of British Pop Culture, page 237:

     First he was known as the ultimate adultescent, a thirty/fortysomething who admitted to being fixated with football and music and stuck at the mental/emotional age of 14.

   • 2001 December 30, Peter Lyle, “Farewell 2001”, in Independent on Sunday:

     PlayStation2 and X-Box are all very well. But for die-hard video-game connoiseurs the Golden Age ended on 1 February, when Sega announced that the Dreamcast was to cease production after just three years. Stung by Sony's success since 1995 with PlayStation, the veteran video-game firm had put all its energies into a final charge on the hearts and minds of kids and adultescents with an affordable, technologically advanced new console.

   • 2004, Australian Book Review, numbers 258-267, page 51:

     This time his protagonist is not a gormless ‘adultescent’ but a middle-aged woman named Meg Riddoch.

   • 2008, Business Week, numbers 4065-4072, page 122:

     For more than a year, the senator's "adultescent" campaign staffers have been swarming college campuses in beat-up cars with college logos, collecting names, building databases, and creating a social networking juggernaut […] .

Synonyms

• adultolescent
• kidult
• rejuvenile

Related terms

• adultescence

Translations

Anagrams

• sand lettuce