Word for young woman

The OP is looking for an English term that satisfies the following conditions.

(1) Its literal meaning is young woman.

(2) If a man used the term to refer to a woman who is not, in fact, young, it would be understood that the man is playfully pretending to be mistaken about the woman’s age, and thereby complimenting the woman on her youthful appearance. This would be understood even if the term is so used in passing, in the midst of a conversation about something entirely different.

(3) The woman would welcome the compliment, even if she is only a casual acquaintance of the man.

The first condition is easy to deal with. Obviously, as has already been pointed out in the comments, one term that has that meaning is young woman. Some people may prefer young lady. The term girl which was, until a few decades ago, widely used in a broad sense that included young women, continues to be so used in some settings. The term lass, featured in another answer on this page is also available, as its use in the works of literature and films has made it familiar to English speakers outside its native region.

It is (2) and (3) that pose problems for the OP. In many present-day English-speaking societies, compliments of that sort are not as common as they may be elsewhere, so it is quite possible that the woman will not understand the point of referring to her as a young woman, particularly if that is done in the context of an exchange that focuses her attention on something else. Moreover, it is possible that a woman from a present-day English-speaking society will be made uncomfortable by a remark that directs attention to her appearance, when it comes from a relative stranger, even if she understands that it was intended as a compliment.

It is also possible that an English-speaking woman would receive the compliment that the OP would make by referring to her as a young woman in the same way as his Israeli acquaintance. The risk of the compliment being misunderstood or backfiring would, however, be much greater.

What is important to appreciate, for the purposes of this site, however, is that this is not due to English language lacking the resources for making such compliments, but rather to the cultural background against which the intended compliments are made and received. The OP’s problem is not that he doesn’t know the correct word to accomplish his purpose, but that the cultural background of many English-speaking societies makes that purpose itself problematic, regardless of what words are used to accomplish it. Further analysis of that cultural background would, however, be outside the scope of this site.

To see that this is not a matter of language, imagine, for a moment, that the conversation that the OP describes had been, for some reason, conducted in English but with the same participants: chances are that the compliment would have been received the same way as in Hebrew. On the other hand, if the conversation had been conducted in Hebrew but the woman in question were a visitor from the United States who learnt some Hebrew, it is quite possible that she wouldn’t understand the compliment or would be unsure how to take it.

The idea for the Describing Words engine came when I was building the engine for Related Words (it’s like a thesaurus, but gives you a much broader set of related words, rather than just synonyms). While playing around with word vectors and the «HasProperty» API of conceptnet, I had a bit of fun trying to get the adjectives which commonly describe a word. Eventually I realised that there’s a much better way of doing this: parse books!

Project Gutenberg was the initial corpus, but the parser got greedier and greedier and I ended up feeding it somewhere around 100 gigabytes of text files — mostly fiction, including many contemporary works. The parser simply looks through each book and pulls out the various descriptions of nouns.

Hopefully it’s more than just a novelty and some people will actually find it useful for their writing and brainstorming, but one neat little thing to try is to compare two nouns which are similar, but different in some significant way — for example, gender is interesting: «woman» versus «man» and «boy» versus «girl». On an inital quick analysis it seems that authors of fiction are at least 4x more likely to describe women (as opposed to men) with beauty-related terms (regarding their weight, features and general attractiveness). In fact, «beautiful» is possibly the most widely used adjective for women in all of the world’s literature, which is quite in line with the general unidimensional representation of women in many other media forms. If anyone wants to do further research into this, let me know and I can give you a lot more data (for example, there are about 25000 different entries for «woman» — too many to show here).

The blueness of the results represents their relative frequency. You can hover over an item for a second and the frequency score should pop up. The «uniqueness» sorting is default, and thanks to my Complicated Algorithm™, it orders them by the adjectives’ uniqueness to that particular noun relative to other nouns (it’s actually pretty simple). As you’d expect, you can click the «Sort By Usage Frequency» button to adjectives by their usage frequency for that noun.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source mongodb which was used in this project.

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