Loading page
say it: pyoo-REEL
puerile is an adjective meaning "of or characteristic of a child". It carries 2 recorded senses.
of or characteristic of a child
“puerile breathing”
displaying or suggesting a lack of maturity
“adolescent insecurity”
“jejune responses to our problems”
“their behavior was juvenile”
“puerile jokes”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for puerile come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.