Word.ws English Dictionary

puellile

Syllables: pu·el·lile/p(j)uːˈɛlaɪl/US/p(j)uˈɛlˌaɪl/

puellile adjective: characteristic of, or pertaining to, a girl or girls.

Adjective

puellile (comparative more puellile, superlative most puellile)

  1. (derogatory, formal) Characteristic of, or pertaining to, a girl or girls.
    • One weak and puerile (or puellile; or anile) articles^([sic]) does a journal more harm than two good articles can neutralize.1858 May 16, Frederic Henry Hedge, MS letter to Henry W. Bellows; quoted in Ronald Vale Wells, Three Christian Transcendentalists: James Marsh, Caleb Sprague Henry, Frederic Henry Hedge (Columbia...
    • [The tale] would be too puellile—may we coin a word?—for strictures, had not the writer challenged them by her introduction.1891 April 29, Guardian, page 682, column 2; quoted in “Pue·llile, Pue·llular”, in James A. H. Murray, editor, A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; […], volume VII (O, P), London...
    Antonyms:
    ungirlish, ungirly

Examples of puellile in a sentence

  • Never having sojourned in North Carolina, Uncle Andy has no conception of what puellile loveliness can be.1912 March 23, The Charlotte Daily Observer, Charlotte, N.C.: The Observer Company, →OCLC, page 4, column 5:
  • The dialogue with Ann-Margret on screen is puerile (or is it puellile?) and insulting to the audience.1965 April 26, Lorne Parton, “See hear: Machine-made star”, in The Province, number 25, Vancouver, B.C.: Southam Press for Pacific Press...
  • Serious acceptance of scepticism must be reserved for those who are puerile (or, to coin a feminist expression, puellile) and unworldly to the point of disability.1993, Jan Śrzednicki, “On the Possibility of Knowledge”, in Timo Airaksinen, Wojciech W. Gasparski, editors, Practical Philosophy and...
  • The humour is thoroughly puerile or, in the case of Minnie the Minx, puellile (and if such a word doesn’t exist, it does now).1993 October 14, Richard Boston, “Video: School daze”, in Peter Preston, editor, The Guardian, London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC...

Synonyms of puellile

Antonyms

Forms of puellile

comparativemore puellile
superlativemost puellile

Origin of puellile

From Latin puella (“female child, girl”) + English -ile (suffix meaning ‘capable of; tending to’ forming adjectives), modelled after puerile. Puella is derived from puellus (“male child, young boy”) + -a (feminine form of -us); puellus is a contraction of puerulus (“little boy; little slave”), from puer (“boy, lad; male page, servant, or slave; child”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂w- (“few, little; smallness”)) + -ulus (“suffix forming diminutives of nouns indicating small size or youth”).

Questions about puellile

What does puellile mean?
Puellile means characteristic of, or pertaining to, a girl or girls.
How do you use puellile in a sentence?
Never having sojourned in North Carolina, Uncle Andy has no conception of what puellile loveliness can be.
What part of speech is puellile?
Puellile is an adjective.
How do you pronounce puellile?
Puellile is pronounced /p(j)uːˈɛlaɪl/ (UK).

Words near puellile in the dictionary

  1. puella aeterna
  2. puella publica
  3. puellae aeternae
  4. puellae publicae
  5. puellas
  6. puellile
  7. puelline
  8. Puello
  9. Puellos
  10. Puente
  11. Puente Alto

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: puellile (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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