A person between the age of 13 and 19 was obviously in general use in the late 1600s, mainly a way of describing young women. The word appears for the first time in John Wilson’s comedy The Cheats which he wrote in 1662 and published two years later “You might have believed me sooner. How often have I told you she was in her teens?” The speaker continues, “Young girls are like nuts. You must gather them when they begin to be brown at bottom, or they’ll fall off themselves”. Not much later, William Wycherley a major English playwright used the word in one of his plays, writing about young girls “When they are once in the teens think they shall never be married.”
Teenage was quite commonly used in the US in the 1900s referring to someone in their teens, but it was only in 1941 that Popular Scientific Monthly used the word teenager, stating “I never knew teenagers could be so serious.”
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