English edit

Etymology edit

Blend of adult +‎ adolescent.

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Noun edit

adultescent (plural adultescents)

  1. An adult who continues to participate in and enjoy youth culture.
    • 1996, Precision Marketing 17 June 21/4 Consider the importance of adultescents to the music biz—they make up over a third of the audience at gigs, but have more cash to spend than teenagers.
    • 2001, Andrew Calcutt, Brit Cult: An A-Z of British Pop Culture, page 237:
      First he was known as the ultimate adultescent, a thirty/fortysomething who admitted to being fixated with football and music and stuck at the mental/emotional age of 14.
    • 2001 December 30, Peter Lyle, “Farewell 2001”, in Independent on Sunday:
      PlayStation2 and X-Box are all very well. But for die-hard video-game connoiseurs the Golden Age ended on 1 February, when Sega announced that the Dreamcast was to cease production after just three years. Stung by Sony's success since 1995 with PlayStation, the veteran video-game firm had put all its energies into a final charge on the hearts and minds of kids and adultescents with an affordable, technologically advanced new console.
    • 2004, Australian Book Review, numbers 258-267, page 51:
      This time his protagonist is not a gormless ‘adultescent’ but a middle-aged woman named Meg Riddoch.
    • 2008, Business Week, numbers 4065-4072, page 122:
      For more than a year, the senator's "adultescent" campaign staffers have been swarming college campuses in beat-up cars with college logos, collecting names, building databases, and creating a social networking juggernaut [] .

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