Childhood

1. n. The commencement; the first period.
2. n. The state of being a child; the time in which persons are children; the condition or time from infancy to puberty.
3. n. Children, taken collectively.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.