The building blocks of English

Affixes

-teen

Also ‑teenth.

Forming the names of numerals from 13 to 19.

Old English inflected form of ten.

Examples are fourteen and nineteen. A pre-teen is a young person below the age of thirteen. The form ‑teenth (see ‑th¹) appears in the associated ordinal numbers; the noun Juneteenth refers to a celebration of 19 June, the anniversary of the emancipation of slaves in Texas on 19 June 1865. Words such as velveteen and sateen derive instead from French words ending in ‑ine (see ‑een).

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