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puer aeternus

puer aeternus noun: a child-god who is forever young.

Noun

puer aeternus (plural pueri aeterni)

  1. A child-god who is forever young.
  2. An archetype of eternal youth.
  3. (broadly) A man who remains emotionally childlike.
    • Michael Jackson, the self-proclaimed King of Pop, eccentric puer aeternus, and singer-songwriter-dancer-entrepreneur, agrees to an out-of-court settlement in a child-molestation suit, reportedly paying out $20 million to settle one of a series of sex-abuse charges brought against him.2017, David Friend, The Naughty Nineties

Synonyms of puer aeternus

Forms of puer aeternus

pluralpueri aeterni

Origin of puer aeternus

From Latin puer aeternus (“eternal boy”) (in Ovid, Metamorphoses), after use in German by Carl Jung.

Questions about puer aeternus

What does puer aeternus mean?
Puer aeternus means a child-god who is forever young.
What part of speech is puer aeternus?
Puer aeternus is a noun.
What is the plural of puer aeternus?
The plural of puer aeternus is pueri aeterni.

Words near puer aeternus in the dictionary

  1. Puellos
  2. Puente
  3. Puente Alto
  4. Puentes
  5. puer
  6. puer aeternus
  7. puerarin
  8. Puercan
  9. puerco pibil
  10. Puerco River
  11. Puerh

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: puer aeternus (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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Cite this entry: “puer aeternus.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/puer_aeternus. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.