What does elderly

Style: MLA. English Language Learners Definition of elderly. Kids Definition of elderly. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? Love words? Need even more definitions? Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms The same, but different. Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs. What Is 'Semantic Bleaching'? How 'literally' can mean "figuratively". Literally How to use a word that literally drives some pe Special recreational programs for the elderly.

Somewhat old; past middle age; approaching old age. Quite old; already in old age; aged. Not current; outmoded. Idioms and Phrasal Verbs the elderly. Origin of elderly. Elderly Sentence Examples. The elderly woman stood in her doorway and waved. Darian waved an elderly woman over. In fact, it was popular with some of the experts I spoke with, who were unfazed by it.

That movement has already begun. Kory Stamper, a lexicographer and an author, told me that the phrase older adults has become much more common in the past 15 years, a period of time during which senior and senior citizen have seen sharp declines in usage.

Older may be catching on because it seems to irritate the smallest number of people. Ina Jaffe, the NPR journalist, found early on in her reporting on old age that people had strong reactions to the existing linguistic palette.

Elder and senior had roughly 30 percent approval ratings. Other important shapers of language have come to that conclusion as well. Older has become the preferred nomenclature in many academic journals and dictionary definitions.

A popular alternative, of course, is to forgo broad labels and specify the ages in question. Pew often mentions the age cutoffs for its generational cohorts, and the New York Times stylebook prefers people in their 70s or people over 80 to elderly.

Older is not without its downsides, though. Second, it is a relative term without a clear comparison: Older … than whom, exactly? For at least a couple of decades, gerontological researchers have been making a distinction between the young old typically those in their 60s and 70s and the old old definitions vary, but 85 and up is common.