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childlike
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
childlike
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
youthful/childlike excitement
▪ Her voice was full of youthful excitement.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
almost
▪ Corbett had always liked Prince Edward; he had a roguish air, coupled with an almost childlike innocence.
▪ Julio Cesar Chavez has a carefree, almost childlike demeanor.
▪ She speaks with an almost childlike directness that wins over the most sceptical audience.
▪ Jean was a gentle soul, and almost childlike.
▪ I remember the helpless, almost childlike way he submitted himself to my ministrations.
■ NOUN
innocence
▪ Corbett had always liked Prince Edward; he had a roguish air, coupled with an almost childlike innocence.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ She has a childlike way of looking at things.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Although some of the Mites were as old as fifteen, because they were called Mites, their routines were always childlike.
▪ Corbett had always liked Prince Edward; he had a roguish air, coupled with an almost childlike innocence.
▪ His face was childlike and flaccid.
▪ Sometimes she became childlike and you could see her at eight or seventeen or twenty-five.
▪ Suddenly your grown-up veneer gives way to a childlike sensitivity that causes you to feel-within minutes-wonderful happiness and acute distress.
▪ The brothers are very childlike and I think that Lewis Carroll is reliving part of his childhood through this chapter.
▪ The wizards designing Macintosh considered it an open invitation to childlike play, and judged that ability among its chief attributes.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Childlike

Childlike \Child"like`\ (ch[imac]ld"l[imac]k`), a. Resembling a child, or that which belongs to children; becoming a child; meek; submissive; dutiful. ``Childlike obedience.''
--Hooker.

Note: Childlike, as applied to persons grown up, is commonly in a good sense; as, childlike grace or simplicity; childlike modesty.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
childlike

1580s, "proper to a child," from child + like (adj.). Meaning "like a child" in a good sense (distinguished from childish) is from 1738.

Wiktionary
childlike

a. 1 innocent and trustful; credulous; artless 2 of, like, or suitable for a child

WordNet
childlike
  1. adj. befitting a young child; "childlike charm" [syn: childly]

  2. exhibiting childlike simplicity and credulity; "childlike trust"; "dewy-eyed innocence"; "simple courtesy" [syn: wide-eyed, dewy-eyed, simple]

Usage examples of "childlike".

On the desk were two audiocassettes with childlike block lettering on them.

He surveyed her round, childlike, flushed features and the downbent head.

Childlike, she named an island in the Vienne, below Limoges and nearly opposite to the Faubourg Saint-Martial, the Ile de France.

Words that are not and can never be words are sought by Lucien here through what he guesses to be the maxillofacial movements of speech, and there is a childlike pathos to the movements that perhaps the rigid-grinned A.

Canopy people were shopping or strolling, most of them couples who at least looked young, although there were very few children present, and those I saw might well have been neotenous adults in their latest body image, or even androform pets programmed with a few childlike phrases.

Footjoys and blue sweat socks, drawing the long tapered steel wand of his Lynx Predator driver from the bag, he feels tall again, tall the way he used to on a hardwood basketball floor when after those first minutes his growing momentum and lengthening bounds and leaps reduced the court to childlike dimensions, to the size of a tennis court and then a Ping-Pong table, his legs unthinkingly eating the distances up, back and forth, and the hoop with its dainty skirtlike net dipping down to be there on the layups.

In fact, being of a childlike nature, his success as a professor of botany quite pleased him, and not content with answering my questions, he set to work to find new vegetable surprises, greatly enjoying my wonder and the sense of importance it gave him.

Well done, understated, but there were touches here and there that helped a striking, almost childlike beauty along.

She was a slim, graceful lass, just past puberty, for though her features were sweet and childlike, her breasts were big and round as tsama melons.

In her childlike simplicity she had accepted this as unquestioningly as she had accepted other facts in her life.

Julie had scarcely recovered from her deep emotion when she rushed out of the room, descended to the next floor, ran into the drawing-room with childlike joy and raised the crystal globe which covered the purse given by the unknown of the Allees de Meillan.

The tiny, red lips were childlike, and the domelike skull was bald and shining.

Bauchelain had triggered unease in the captain, then this manhis broad, round face, his eyes buried in puffed flesh and wide full-lipped mouth set slightly downturned at the corners, a face both childlike and ineffably monstroussent ripples of fear through Gruntle.

She was an alarming blend of childlike innocence and trust, and an astuteness far beyond her years.

It struck him now that her walk was somewhat too childlike and bouncy for a normally mature young woman.