young at heart

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

an idiom describing a person who retains the enthusiasm, curiosity, openness to new experience, and playfulness associated with youth despite having accumulated many years of life, suggesting that certain qualities of temperament and spirit can be independent of chronological age; to be young at heart is to refuse the psychological closing-down that age stereotypes associate with growing older — the narrowing of curiosity, the hardening of opinion, the diminishment of delight — and to maintain the freshness of engagement with life that characterises its most vivid periods; the phrase is almost always used as a compliment, celebrating the people who move through life without losing their capacity for wonder and their openness to experience; it gained popular cultural currency through the 1954 Frank Sinatra song Young at Heart, whose lyric connects youthful spirit to resilience and the capacity to find meaning even in the face of life's disappointments