Word.ws English Dictionary

age of reason

age of reason noun: seven years of age, at which age a person is morally liable for the sins that they commit. Also the alternative letter-case form of Age of Reason.

Noun

age of reason (usually uncountable, plural ages of reason)

  1. (usually) Seven years of age, at which age a person is morally liable for the sins that they commit.
    • Book 1:
      Reason alone teaches us to know good and bad. . . . Before the age of reason we do good and bad without knowing it, and there is no morality in our actions. . . . A child wants to upset everything he sees; he smashes, breaks everything he can reach.
      Book 4:
      We hold that no child who dies...1762, Jean Jacques Rousseau, translated by Allan Bloom, Émile, or, on Education
    • On September tenth — the morning of my seventh birthday — I came downstairs to the kitchen, where my mother was washing the dishes and my father was… reading the paper or something, and I sort-of presented myself to them in the doorway, and they said “Hey! Happy birthday!” And I said “I’m seven.”...2006, February: Julia Sweeney, “Letting Go of God” performed at TED2006, 0:16–0:54
  2. (broadly, usually) Age at which a person is able to distinguish right from wrong and make their own decisions.

Proper noun capitalized: Age of Reason

the Age of Reason

  1. Synonym of Age of Enlightenment
    • It suited some thinkers in the eighteenth-century Age of Reason to look down on the Middle Ages as a primitive and backward time when men believed that the world was flat.1999, Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger, The Year 1000: What life was like at the turn of The First Millennium, London: Abacus, published 2000, page 91

Also used as

age of reason is also the alternative letter-case form of Age of Reason.

Synonyms of age of reason

Forms of age of reason

Noun
pluralages of reason
Proper noun
alternative uncommonage of reason

Questions about age of reason

What does age of reason mean?
Age of reason means seven years of age, at which age a person is morally liable for the sins that they commit.
What part of speech is age of reason?
Age of reason can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of age of reason?
The plural of age of reason is ages of reason.

Words near age of reason in the dictionary

  1. age of judgement
  2. age of judgment
  3. age of majority
  4. Age of Mammals
  5. Age of Man
  6. age of reason
  7. Age of Reptiles
  8. Age of Sail
  9. age out
  10. age play
  11. age played

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: age of reason (page history and authors); Age of Reason (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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