Adultify

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To treat a non-adult like an adult.

    "Neil Postman argued for The Disappearance of Childhood in 1982, maintaining that television prematurely adultifies children by confronting them with crime and violence and other adult topics."

Example

More examples

"Neil Postman argued for The Disappearance of Childhood in 1982, maintaining that television prematurely adultifies children by confronting them with crime and violence and other adult topics."

Etymology

From adult + -ify, likely a back-formation from adultification.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.