TEENFUL

TileHead’s Word of the Day for 27 June 2012

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Word of the Day:

TEENFUL  (adj.)

Definition(s):

1. (adj.) filled with grief; grievous
2. (adj.) sorrowful; afflicted

Useful info for word game players:

• Front hooks: (none)
• Back hooks: (none)
• Anagrams: (none)
• Longer extensions: (none)
• Wraparounds: (none)
• Other Spellings: (none)
• Related Forms: (none)

Current theme:

No theme this week — just a few random selections from the good wordbook

Epilogue:

The word TEEN was used throughout Middle English and Early Modern English to mean “grief, sorrow, or trouble,” or sometimes more strongly “ill fortune or harm.”  The word derives from Old English teona “injury, wrong,” and is related to Old Norse and Old Frisian forms of the same.  It was employed to good effect by some of the most famous of English writers:

Almighty and al merciable quene,
To whom that al this world fleeth for socour,
To have relees of sinne, sorwe and tene,
Glorious virgine, of alle floures flour,
To thee I flee, confounded in errour!
~ Geoffrey Chaucer, “An A.B.C.” (c. 1375)

I to grave, where peace and rest lye with mee,
Eightie odde yeeres of sorrow I have seen,
And each howres joy wrackt with a weeke of teene.
~ William Shakespeare, Richard III (c. 1597)

The vagaries of language are such that this sense of the word is not employed much anymore, and the derivative TEENFUL (“full of sorrow”) is also fading into desuetude.

Though you may know some teenful teens, the old “sorrowful” sense of the word is not related to the combining form -teen found in numbers such as THIRTEEN, FOURTEEN, etc.  That -teen was simply an inflected form of the number TEN in Old and Middle English, so that fiftene or FIFTEEN was simply a short way of saying “five and ten.”  TEEN, in the sense of a person with an age in the years ending in -teen, first appears in English in the 17th century.  Words such as TEENAGE, TEENAGER, TEENYBOP, and TEENYBOPPER are even more recent creations, all first appearing or gaining popularity in the twentieth century.

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