Meaning & use
boyhood
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Meanings
noununcountable
The period of a male person's life when he is a boy.
Grammar: No plural and no a/an: say in his boyhood, not in a boyhood.
Patterns
- in someone's boyhood
- during someone's boyhood
- spend your boyhood in a place
He spent his boyhood in a small town near the coast.
In his boyhood, my grandfather walked three miles to school every day.
The photographs show the writer during his boyhood in the 1950s.
nouncountable
The whole experience or character of being a boy, especially when it is remembered as a distinct stage.
Grammar: Used with a/an or an adjective when describing one person's early years: a happy boyhood, an unhappy boyhood.
Patterns
- a happy/unhappy boyhood
- have a boyhood
- a boyhood friend
She wrote a book about her father's boyhood in rural Ireland.
He had a difficult boyhood, moving from one city to another.
They were boyhood friends and stayed close for sixty years.
Common combinations
- spend your boyhood
- He spent his boyhood on a farm in the north.
- a happy boyhood
- She often talked about her father's happy boyhood.
- boyhood friend
- Tom is a boyhood friend of mine from primary school.
- in his boyhood
- In his boyhood he loved fishing in the river.
- during someone's boyhood
- During his boyhood, the family moved three times.
- a boyhood memory
- That old house is one of his earliest boyhood memories.
Synonyms and how they differ
- childhood
- Childhood covers the whole period of being a child and is used for both males and females, so it is the better choice when you are not talking specifically about a boy.
- youth
- Youth usually means the teenage or young-adult years, so it comes later than boyhood and can also refer to young people as a group.
- adolescence
- Adolescence is the technical term for the teenage years, so it is narrower and more formal than boyhood.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: boyhood or childhood? boyhood or manhood?
boyhood vs childhood
Childhood is the general period of being a child and applies to anyone, while boyhood applies only to males and is often used when contrasting with girlhood or manhood.
boyhood vs manhood
Manhood is the adult stage that follows boyhood, so the two words describe different periods of life.
Practice
Which sentence uses boyhood correctly?
Choose one answer.
'He spent his boyhood in a quiet village' is correct because boyhood is the uncountable period of a male person's early life and takes a possessive like his. Option 0 is wrong because she cannot have a boyhood, option 2 is wrong because a boyhood is not used for a single completed event with yesterday, and option 3 is wrong because the noun is not used in the plural this way.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “boyhood”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.