What does "waithood" mean?

A period of limbo faced by young college graduates in developing countries, in which activities belonging to the traditional transition into adulthood, such as marriage and buying a home, are put off to allow the securing of employment or money.

Waithood

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
A period of limbo faced by young college graduates in developing countries, in which activities belonging to the traditional transition into adulthood, such as marriage and buying a home, are put off to allow the securing of employment or money. uncountable

Etymology

Coined by Diane Singerman in 2007 as a blend of wait + adulthood, modelled after the earlier term wait unemployment; see the citations page.

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