This study shows how the use of the term adolescent, taken in lexical context as developed in official texts governing physical education in France from 1925 to 2010, allows us to examine what legislators thought about the discipline’s target audience. Use of the lexicographical functions of the Tropes® software to examine the content of these texts reveals a focus on outcomes in the training, development, and education of teenagers from 1959, with the ensuing emergence in 1986 of justification for implementing a form of education that supported and modified changes in adolescents.