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OneKitly

childish

adjectivecommon in dialogue

  • //ˈt͡ʃaɪldɪʃ//

Immature in thought or behaviour.

adjective

  1. 1

    Immature in thought or behaviour.

    Your childish temper tantrums are not going to change my decision on this matter.

    Other instances of primitive thought are the childish belief that science in the future will be able 'objectively' to predict the date of social revolutions in the light of technological development, or the 'scientific law' that people write books, or baseless fantasies on the origin of religion, etc.

  2. 2

    Suitable for or expected of a child.

    This game is very childish.

    She remembered, too, when, after a long childish illness, her father had carried her in his arms to the garden, […]

    As I walked to and fro daily between Southwark and Blackfriars, and lounged about at meal-times in obscure streets, the stones of which may, for anything I know, be worn at this moment by my childish feet, I wonder how many of these people were wanting in the crowd that used to come filing before me in review again, to the echo of Captain Hopkins’s voice!

Etymology

From Middle English childisch, from Old English ċildisċ. By surface analysis, child + -ish.

Forms

comparative
more childish
superlative
most childish
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).