Word.ws English Dictionary

stripling

Syllables: strip·ling/ˈstɹɪplɪŋ/

stripling noun: a young man in the state of adolescence, or just passing from boyhood to manhood; a lad. .

Noun

stripling (plural striplings)

  1. (also, attributive, dated, humorous, sometimes) A young man in the state of adolescence, or just passing from boyhood to manhood; a lad. .
    • And the king ſaid, Enquire thou whoſe ſonne the ſtripling is.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, 1 Samuel 17:56, column 1
    • And now, I suppose, my Striplings are formally clad, and togated, newly arrived at the Vniversities1634, Miles Sandys, Prudence
  2. A seedling with most of the leaves stripped off.
    • For there upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a mediæval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs.1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, “[Our Lady of the Snows.] Father Apollinaris.”, in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, 1st American edition, Boston, Mass.: Roberts Brothers, →OCLC, page 91

Proper noun capitalized: Stripling

Stripling (plural Striplings)

  1. A surname.

stripling meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Bengali and Malayalam

stripling in Tamil

கான்முளை, சிறுவன், சிறு பையன், முழுவளர்ச்சியுறாச் சிறுவன்

stripling in Urdu

ایک لڑکا, نوخیز

stripling in Bengali

অল্পবয়স্ক যুবক, কিশোর

stripling in Malayalam

adolescent, youth, youngster
കുമാരൻ, തരുണൻ, ബാലൻ, ചെറുപ്പക്കാരൻ, മര്യൻ, യുവാവ്

Examples of stripling in a sentence

  • I was yet a stripling of eighteen without any experience of the world.1927, M[ohandas] K[aramchand] Gandhi, “Outcaste”, in Mahadev Desai, transl., The Story of My Experiments with Truth: Translated from the...
  • Altman in particular passed what would become known at YC as the young founders’ test: Can this stripling manage adults?2016 October 3, Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny”, in The New Yorker:

Synonyms of stripling

13 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of stripling

Forms of stripling

Noun
pluralstriplings
Proper noun
pluralStriplings

Origin of stripling

From Middle English stripling (“an adolescent, a youth (specifically one who is male); a child”) [and other forms], possibly from strepen (“to remove the clothes of, undress, strip; to peel off; to skin (an animal); to remove; to take something away from someone; to plunder, rob”) (connoting something that is stripped and thin, and yet to reach its full size) + -ling (suffix forming diminutives). Strepen is derived from Old English *strēpan (Anglian), *strīepan, *strīpan, *strȳpan (West Saxon), from Proto-West Germanic *straupijan, from Proto-Germanic *straupijaną (“to strip; to pluck; to wipe”), from *streupaną (“to touch”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *strew-, *sterw-, *ster- (“a strip; a streak; a beam, ray”)) + *-janą (suffix forming causatives from strong verbs with the sense of ‘to cause to do’). The English word is analysable as strip (“long, narrow piece”) + -ling.

Questions about stripling

What does stripling mean?
Stripling means a young man in the state of adolescence, or just passing from boyhood to manhood; a lad. .
What is stripling in Tamil?
Stripling in Tamil is கான்முளை, சிறுவன், சிறு பையன். See Stripling meaning in Tamil.
How do you use stripling in a sentence?
I was yet a stripling of eighteen without any experience of the world.
What part of speech is stripling?
Stripling can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce stripling?
Stripling is pronounced /ˈstɹɪplɪŋ/ (UK).
What is the plural of stripling?
The plural of stripling is striplings.

Words near stripling in the dictionary

  1. striplights
  2. striplike
  3. Striplin
  4. stripline
  5. striplines
  6. stripling
  7. striplings
  8. Striplins
  9. striploin
  10. striploins
  11. stripmall

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stripling (page history and authors); Stripling (page history and authors); stripling (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); stripling (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); stripling (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); stripling (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-stripling.wav.

Cite this entry: “stripling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stripling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.