puerile
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈpjʊə.ɹaɪl/
ipa: /ˈpjʊɹɪl/
ipa: /ˈpjʊɹaɪl/
Forms: form: more puerile
form: most puerile
Etymology: From Latin puerīlis (“childish”), from puer (“child, boy”).
Senses: examples: text: 1850, Thomas De Quincey, French and English Manners (originally published in Hogg's Instructor
The French have been notorious through generations for their puerile affectation of Roman forms, models, and historic precedents.
text: From the table he had received the gout; from the alcove a tendency to convulsions; from the grandeeship a pride so vast and puerile that he seldom heard anything that was said to him and talked to the ceiling in a perpetual monologue; from the exile, oceans of boredom, a boredom so persuasive that it was like pain,—he woke up with it and spent the day with it, and it sat by his bed all night watching his sleep.
ref: 1927, Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, page 79:
text: But can there be anything more puerile, more short-sighted, than the views of those Economists who believe in all earnest that this woeful transitory state means nothing but adapting society to the acquisitive propensities of capitalists, both landlords and money-lords?
ref: 1853 March 22, Karl Marx, “Forced Emigration”, in New-York Tribune:
text: […] I have always found it hard that Hamlet, a character that I love and admire, is guilty of a puerile misogyny and, perhaps, more worryingly, of the unnecessary deaths of his old friends from university, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
ref: 2014 April 12, Simon Russell Beale, “Why Shakespeare always says something new: As the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth approaches, the great Shakespearean actor Simon Russell Beale explains his secrets [print version: The king and I]”, in The Daily Telegraph (Review), London, page R7:
text: Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race, not merely to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds.
ref: 1930 July, West Kirby, Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, Preface (page 9 of the Dover 1968 reprint of L&FM and Star Maker)
synonyms: word: juvenile
word: silly
word: trifling
word: babish
word: babyish
word: bairnish
word: childish
word: dootsie
word: hissy
word: lactifluous
word: infantile
word: infantine
word: immature
word: kiddish
word: juvenile
word: milky
word: puerile
word: base
word: contemptible
word: foolish
word: for the birds
word: futile
word: frivolous
word: idle
word: ignorable
word: immaterial
word: inconsequential
word: inconsiderable
word: indifferent
word: insignificant
word: like a fart in a windstorm
word: meager
word: mean
word: minor
word: negligible
word: nothingburger
word: nondescript
word: paltry
word: petty
word: picayune
word: picayunish
word: piddling
word: piddly
word: pissant
word: pitiful
word: pointless
word: silly
word: simple
word: slight
word: tin-pot
word: trifling
word: trivial
word: two-bit
word: unimportant
word: unweighty
word: vain
word: worthless
word: wretched
glosses: Childish; trifling; silly.
glosses: Characteristic of, or pertaining to, a boy or boys; compare puellile.
Derived terms: puerilely
puerilism
puerility
puerilization
Related terms: boyish
yobbish
youthful