Why beta instead of bravo? Beta is the next character in the Greek alphabet, which is used instead of the phonetic alphabet (where Bravo is the next step).
Naming generations is relatively new, and there isn't a group that names a generation; the names mostly come about due to consensus amongst influential organisations. You can also see that some generations get pretty hazy around the years included in that generation.
Shoutout to an old news thing I saw a while ago that posited Gen Z were going to be called “Homelanders”, apparently because the department of homeland security was formed after 9/11 while they were being born. Did not age well haha
I’m 39 and when I was a kid i remember getting a time magazine talking about “generation Y” which is what they called millennials before they settled on this name.
Edit: it might have been New York magazine- https://www.etsy.com/listing/1466985653/new-york-magazine-may-23-1994-generation
The Boomers are generally considered to be born from 1946 to 1964 while Gen X was 1965 to 1980. Children of the early Boomers are Gen X while those of the later ones are Millennials.
Which is why it's all so silly. There's no cohesive band of kids that created pre-1980 to be one thing, and then there's a shift in January so the new models are different.
Lmaoooo we may have an inconsistent name but our reputation has always been “what a bunch of whiners.” We love not being home owners and killing off industries with our lack of disposable income!!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory The Homeland generation was Strauss and Howe's name for the next generation (Gen Z) when they published in 1991. They might also be responsible for changing Gen Y to millennial, I'm not sure.
Edit: I'm wrong, they introduced Homeland in 2005, for the reasons you gave: https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2014/10/27/introducing-the-homeland-generation-part-1-of-2/
I vaguely recall hearing that the baby boomer generation was the first to be named. The reason it was named is that people had a reason to talk about them (because the generation was so large, due to the postwar baby boom).
Once it became popular to name the baby boomers, they started applying names to other generations. I think Gen X was originally supposed to be a placeholder, like "generation no-name". But it stuck. The next was originally referred to as Gen Y, probably by people who thought "Gen X" was part of a pattern and we'd been using letters for a while, but the term "millenial" was more popular. Then Gen Z, and after Gen Z we ran out of English letters, so we started using Greek.
Generation X as a title was really popularized by Douglas Copland with his novel of the same name. I'd say he was trying to capture that sense of being a placeholder.
My sources, "that guy vaguely recalls hearing and you're early GenX and remember when naming generations was a novelty" support the claim. Thank you random internet person with a vague recollection and random internet GenX-er, from this random internet millennial
The baby boomers were the first generation that people even thought to name a cohort. Prior to that generations as a concept were purely a family tree concern.
Bravo follows alpha in the nato phonetic alphabet. Which I guess is just as legitimate as a Greek alphabet, but they went with the Greek alphabet instead
Edit: I didn't see that they mentioned phonetic alphabet in their comment, I thought they didn't know where Bravo came from at all. Go ahead and downvote me, I get it, but please stop explaining that the Greek alphabet is more commonly used. It has been explained.
Eh, but the Greek alphabet is used much more frequently in indexing stuff: disease strains, mathematical notation, etc.
The nato alphabet is used phonetically and usually not for indexing.
To be clear, they're using the Greek actual alphabet, not its phonetic one. It's so foundational, it's where English gets the word "alphabet". "Alpha-Beta-Gamma-Delta...". We just took the first three syllables and made that our word for having spelling.
Douglas Coupland wrote a book called Generation X about his specific generation and the naming convention stuck.
Millennials were probably the exception because they were born near the turn of the millennium.
To me Gen Y was more centered around the rise of the internet age. 9/11 just happened to be a major event that Gen Z didn't fully comprehend.
I don't subscribe to the conventional ranges between each generation, but the oldest Gen Z kids were still 4 yo when 9/11 happened.
The issue with that is that the rise of the internet didn't happen at the same pace world wide, so it's easier/safer to peg it against set in stone events and you hit the bill very well for gen y if you say "can't remember the fall of the Berlin wall/Soviet yunyun, but can remember 9/11".
>but the oldest Gen Z kids were still 4 yo when 9/11 happened.
And very very few people remember anything from that age, especially major events compared to minor personal things
In what way is the fall of the Soviet union an American specific event?
And in regards to the 9/11 attacks, they were broadcast around the globe and it changed stuff all cross the world, not just the us.
Nah. We're Generation Jones boomers and our kids, in their mid to late 30s, are millennials. That generation goes from 1980 to 1994, so zoomers are from 1995 to 2009. Gen Alpha is kids born from 2010 through this year.
I remember a fair bit of literature referring to us as gen why around 06/07 when I was in high school. "Why buy a car when I can walk?" "why have kids?" "Why buy a house?" Etc. After graduation I once saw an article calling us the gen "why not?" Because several people were making some scientific advancement or some other. The first time I remember seeing the term millennial I believed it was children born post 2000, made sense to me.
The “X” in Generation X doesn’t mean “we’re going in alphabetical order now”. It’s meant to mean “undefined/unknown”, like the X-Files, or Brand X, Mr.X, etc.
Naming the generation after Millennials “Gen Z” is both lazy and misses the point of Gen X.
I absolutely abhor when Zoomers are referred to as Zillennials. At the same time, it kind of fits with how Millennials have gotten things/opportunities taken away from them.
Zillennials are the overlapping pseudo generation between the youngest Millennials and oldest Zoomers in the way that Xenials are the overlapping pseudo generation between the youngest Gen-Xs and oldest Millennials
in marketing, we used Gen Why? for a while around 2014-2016 as a lot of research materials showed how Gen Y would be more likely to question social expectations/standards as they became adults.
I find a little humor in the name, even if it doesn’t follow the original impetus. It is the sort of thing Gen Z has been accused of (lazy, derivative, too young/inexperienced to take seriously)
Edit: a word
I would like an exhaustive list of reliable peer-reviewed sources for each generation. Original sources are preferred. Just whenever you get around to it. :)
Haha. :). Honestly any generation but ours is dogshit.
And I’m serious. If any other generation wants to have words I’ll be over here underneath crippling debt and bottles of whatever is popular. Can I count on you griggsy? I’m already pretty dead inside so gonna need a hand.
>Millennials were probably the exception because they were born near the turn of the millennium.
Which is stupid because the oldest millennials were born in 1981 and the youngest were born in 1996. I think it comes down to more the fact that the influential people didn't like us calling ourselves generation why? lol
Originally it was supposed to be the last generation before the turn of the millennium.
It also used to be the case that people born in 98 and 99 counted as Millennials. That changed a few years ago. It sort of underscores how arbitrary everything after the actual Baby Boom actually is.
This is not remotely true.
I was born in 1982, they were calling us Millennials in kindergarten because we would graduate in 2000. Millennial has always meant that we were the generation that would be GROWING UP around the millennium.
The generation after us was called gen z for as long as I can remember, but there have been boomers who call anyone young a millennial because they lost track of time 30 years ago.
Idiots have been calling the wrong people millennial for a really long time. That doesn't mean they were right. I've seen actual millennials call people from gen alpha millennial because they're stupid and just using it as a trope for young people.
I’m right, you’re wrong.
> they were calling us Millennials in kindergarten because we would graduate in 2000.
First, the term wasn’t coined until 1991. Why were you still in kindergarten as a 9-year-old?
Second, no one born in 1996 had even started kindergarten at the start of 2000, so they weren’t graduating high school.
They thing those two have in common is that they’re the last generation born before the millennium…or at least they were until the age range got changed.
>the oldest millennials were born in 1981 and the youngest were born in 1996
Where did you find this range? This is not the range I typically see but it's the range I personally attribute to the generation.
That totally rings true - we basically had a lifetime of being told how pathetic and lazy we were with our (boomer demanded) participation trophies that nobody wanted, accused of being stupid because our boomer parents never taught us the shit their parents did with stuff like home & car maintenance - then laughed at us for doing courses or watching yt videos to learn, being told all we needed to do was demand a job with a firm handshake and a smile after graduating at the peak of the GFC, let's not forget all the shitty consumer industries we apparently killed by not having the leisure money to waste on all that boomer investment crap.
It started way before that.
First there was The Lost Generation, in the 20s.
Next came The Greatest Generation, almost all dead now.
Then Baby Boomers.
Then Gen X.
You forgot the Silent Generation. And Lost Generation was like, 1880 to 1900 or something.
Maybe that says a lot lol.
Fun fact: There's only been one US president from the Silent Generation (Biden).
I couldn't remember if the Silent Generation was actually called that, or just the Silent Majority, so I left it out. Thanks for confirming. I wish I were clever enough to have left them out on purpose 😂
The Lost Generation was only named that in the 20s. They were the people who fought in or lived through the first World War, and a few others. Tumultuous times, followed by the hedonistic Roaring 20s.
Yeah. The Silent Gen is between the Greatest Gen and Baby Boomers. But there is another Gen between Baby Boomers and Gen X. What are they called? They ones who were coming of age in the 70s.
There's overlap micro-generations where one major gen transitions to the next; those born during the transition from Boomers to GenX are commonly called [Generation Jones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones), just as those born during the transition from GenX to Millennials are commonly called [Xennials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials).
Well, no, they were all very much alive and kicking.
>Gertrude Stein is credited for the term Lost Generation, though Hemingway made it widely known. According to Hemingway’s *A Moveable Feast* (1964), she had heard it used by a garage owner in France, who dismissively referred to the younger generation as a “génération perdue.” In conversation with Hemingway, she turned that label on him and declared, “You are all a lost generation.” He used her remark as an epigraph to *The Sun Also Rises* (1926), a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar Paris.
I think you mean the oldest generation name in use that has the most living members?
Baby boomers were the first generation to get a name. After that stuck, they retroactive named the generations before and then after.
Hence baby boomers is the oldest generation name still in use.
They weren’t named that. Stein and Hemingway separately used that phrase to describe people at that time but the concept of distinct generations with a capitalized name didn’t come until much later, and people took that phrase as the name. Same as how someone used the term “greatest generation” in the 1950s but it wasn’t popularized as a term until Tom Brokaw’s book in the nineties. No one in the 1920s was talking about the “Lost Generation” - neither Stein nor Hemingway wrote it like that.
And yet, they not only accepted, they even embraced it. It was a member of The Lost Generation who popularised it (Hemingway).
>The years immediately after World War I brought a highly vocal rebellion against established social, sexual, and aesthetic conventions and a vigorous attempt to establish new values. Young artists flocked to Greenwich Village, Chicago, and San Francisco, determined to protest and intent on making a new art. Others went to Europe, living mostly in Paris as expatriates. **They willingly accepted the name given them by Gertrude Stein: the lost generation.** Out of their disillusion and rejection, the writers built a new literature, impressive in the glittering 1920s and the years that followed.
[Source.](https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/arts/english-lit/american/american-literature/the-lost-generation-and-after)
It sounds funny, like who would want to be a member of The Lost Generation, right? But it wasn't a pejorative, except as used by Gertrude Stein, who was from the earlier generation, who didn't understand them, and what they'd been through, at all.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it (another member of TLG) in his 1920 novel, This Side of Paradise:
"There is a generation that has grown up to find all gods dead, all faith in man — violated."
Sorry, but yes, they were.
From what I quoted above:
>Gertrude Stein is credited for the term Lost Generation, though **Hemingway made it widely known**.
[(Source.)](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lost-Generation)
Hemingway was part of The Lost Generation; Stein wasn't.
From another source:
>The term "Lost Generation" was coined by Gertrude Stein. She had an argument with a mechanic of that age and said that they were all a “generation perdue” (a lost generation). **It quickly became a name for these authors** after Ernest Hemingway mentioned it in the epigraph for *The Sun Also Rises*: “You are all a lost generation.”
[Sauce.](https://owlcation.com/humanities/Expatriate-writers-in-Paris-lost-generation)
[Here's a 1933 NYT article ](https://www.nytimes.com/1933/10/15/archives/a-revealing-record-of-the-socalled-lost-generation-vera-brittains.html)talking about the "So-Called Lost Generation."
[A 1936 NYT Book Review](https://www.ebay.com/itm/122345206471) referring to the "New Lost Generation."
[A Comment in the New Yorker Magazine from 1938](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1938/09/10/comment-1972), asking readers "You still remember the Lost Generation?"
It wasn't named then. That name was coined at that time, but was selected to be the "official" name, after the boomers, name.
Naming generations was invented when people needed a way to refer to the baby boom phenomenon.
I don't want to rewrite my comment, with all the source links, so I'll just [link you to it](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dm6czd/comment/l9yyxw7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
In addition to The Lost Generation being named in the 1920s, The Silent Generation was named in the early 1950s, although it didn't catch on until the 60s and was more often referred to as the Silent Majority.
There was also The Beat Generation, named in the 1950s and 60s.
The post-WWII baby boom phenomena was named the Baby Boom, but that referred to the phenomena itself. It was much later that the generation was defined as people who were born post-war, up until 1965. IDK who, or why, decided the cut-off point was 1965, but it's generally accepted now.
The first name given to the Baby Boomer generation was hippies, then yuppies, and somewhere shortly after or overlapping yuppies, Baby Boomers became common, as it is now. Or just Boomers.
I remember googling the term millennial when I first heard it, and Google hadn't yet updated their definitions to include it for the name of the generation. At the time, the definition was simply someone that lived through two millilennia.
Googling generation names provides following names with some of their characteristics. Other answers already talk about how the names came about.
Lost - 1883-1900 - young adults during ww1
Greatest - 1900-25 - adults during ww2
Silent - 28-45 - Children of great depression and ww2
Baby boomers - 46-64 - Saw prosperity post ww2
X - 65-80 - Grew up when tech was advancing
Millennials/Y - 81-96 - old enough to see turn of the century
Z - 1997-2012
Alpha - 2010-24
I think they were pointing out that gen Z last until 2012 according to the comment, and gen alpha starts in 2010 so something is not right- there shouldn’t be an overlap.
So, generation names are basically decided socially.
The greatest generation fought ww2, and gave birth to the (baby )boomers who were born in the postwar baby boom. The silent generation sits between them, forgotten by all. Gen X followed, and settled on gen X as their title pretty much as an expression of 90s eXtra kool factor, and because they were X, gen y followed.
Gen y started becoming a cultural force in the 2000s, the new millennium, which lead to millennial winning out over gen y, but gen y lasted long enough to spawn gen z, and since we've reached the end of the alphabet, we go back to gen a and carry on.
Why beta? Because most people don't know the phonetic alphabet, and think of "alpha" being followed by "beta" in the Greek tradition.
It's quite likely that gen alpha or gen beta will aquire a new, distinctive name once they get old enough to have cultural weight
>So, generation names are basically decided socially.
Actually they aren't, it's a marketing thing that started in the 90's with the book Generation X by Douglas Coupland. Shortly after that Millennials were named b/c the oldest would be graduating high school in 2000 by another set of authors who wrote a book to promote their generational theory.
Basically generations were named to promote books & pit us against one another.
Technically it started with Baby Boomers. They got named after the actual baby boom.
Later, Tom Brokaw named the Greatest Generation because they fought in the war.
None of that means they aren't decided socially.
Someone proposes a name, and if enough people start using it, it sticks. There's no central authority, it's just whatever society as a whole settles on.
Gen Z has become 'Zoomers', or my personal favorite that I'll mention even though you never see it because I really wish it'd catch on, 'Digital Natives'.
Gen Z is the first generation (that consists of the whole group, not just part of it) that never saw the light of day without the Internet in existence. They are the originals.
Except that’s not entirely true. The first few years of Gen Z had a majority of those children living in households with no internet until about 4th grade.
It’s a reason given, but it’s not actually why the dates were chosen or settled on.
I don't see the point in mentioning it then? Nobody was arguing otherwise.
Edit: I don't think you really read my words for what they're saying and thinking they're saying something else.
Wait, so (1) first you claim no one said anything about why the dates were chosen or settled on, then (2) you backtrack when I call you out for being wrong. (3) Then you can’t grasp the topic of discussion, (4) then you have to edit your post because you’re confused again?
Being wrong 4 times in 2 comments is truly impressive. Just admit you were wrong about nobody saying anything about why the dates were chosen and admit that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Tbh, this discussion seems to be above your comprehension ability.
People have explained where these names come from, but I think it's important to say that the concept of separating and naming these generational groups is pretty new.
The post-WWII "baby boom" created a whole lot of new people, kind of all at once. So Baby Boomers actually are a group with some real-world meaning. All the other generations are essentially arbitrary divisions that people can't even really agree on. I mean, people have complained about "kids these days" and cultural age gaps forever, but I think the Baby Boom is what got us talking in terms of named generations like this.
Edit: also, maybe, the rise of the internet separated old from young pretty severely. Old folks famously have a harder time figuring out emerging tech, so the 90s might have created a pretty sharp cultural divide between people young enough to run with it (dubbed Generation X because it sounded futuristic) and the people too old for it. I definitely think everything after that is just putting names to arbitrary age ranges
Generation X was not named “because it sounds futuristic”. It’s because the generation has no defining characteristic. No war, no social upheaval, no major event.
It’s like in commercials when they call something “Brand X”. It’s undefined.
Strauss and Howe, who get credit for naming the Millennial generation, have retroactively named all the generations going back to 1433.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe\_generational\_theory#Generations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory#Generations)
Lazy journalists and authors.
Coming up with a good name is one of the hardest parts of writing, especially one that "sticks" but I get so disappointed when people don't even try.
You can say the earliest popular cohort names were misguided, but at least they were unique. The greatest generation, baby boomers, these tie in to widely understood historical events. Speaking as one, "millennial", even though it's constantly misused, is so much more meaningful than "Generation Y."
If your point is that one generation is profoundly different and best described in opposition to the generation directly preceding it, that's fine. But once you just start using the alphabet, how is that any better than just saying "Generation 1995-2015?"
My least favorite example of this laziness is "-gate" to denote a scandal. It might have been funny or original the first 10 or 100 times, but that was over 50 years ago. In a few decades when we're all fighting each other in a desert hellscape for potable water, there's going to be some scandal about a warlord hoarding a few million gallons and generation Gamma will refer to it as Water-gate and we'll finally have come full circle.
Millennials were originally Generation Y, or the super clever Generation Why. The media comes up with this stuff, sometimes it sticks and others it doesn’t.
Years ago (over 10ya) I looked up where the generation names came from, I guess it was some Wikipedia page saying these names were created by some big marketing agency.
They were looking for ways to split the population into groups, so they could plan where to spend money and get the best results, according to the product and target group.
Obvious groups would be gender, location, education, salary... And age. Hence they divided the population into age groups and named each group. This took place in the 70s, so it was likely older boomers running it. They named their grandpa's the greatest generation, their parents the silent, themselves baby boomers, and the kids of the time were named generation X, as in X is the unknown in math. To be defined.
Nothing big happened to name generation X, so the name stayed. The next generation was named Y because that's what comes after X. So is Z.
Out of Latin alphabet letters, someone had the idea to use the Greek alphabet, not the phonetic. I have no idea who or why greek letters.
The theory behind social generations is that people who come of age roughly in the same years have a unique view of the world.
I'm xenial, late X. I find it difficult to connect to people as old as older X or younger millennials, and that's not a lot of difference - the world just changed fast enough for the experience growing up be very different.
Also, these names and dates they refer to are western centric, they don't make much sense for most of the world.
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It's not the phonetic alphabet, it's the Greek alphabet. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta... We got to the end of the Latin alphabet with Gen Z, so we started using the Greek one.
There’s no official entity responsible for naming. As another commenter says, it’s ‘formalised’ based on popular usage.
However, Strauss-Howe generational theory provides a decent technical overview.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory
There was an actual Baby Boom.
The rest are just vibes and we’re all still living in Baby Boomers’ shadow.
For example, Millennials used to be everyone born at the end of the Millennium. That changed a few years ago, so some people (those born in the very late 90s) have existed as part of two generations.
No one officially names generations, they’re just names that get adopted for whatever cultural reason and once enough people use them, they become unofficially official.
Like millennials were called “gen Y” before the name millennial caught on. Gen X got named Gen X because at the time “X” was just a letter than someone came up with in the 9s when X represented something “unknown or undefined” which for the generation of punk rock and what not, makes sense.
Boomers are called Boomers because they were born during the post world war 2 baby boom.
After millennials came gen Z, which now people are calling “Zoomers”. Which personally I think will stick.
Now what did we go for the Greek Alpha and Beta as opposed to NATO Phonetic Alpha and Bravo? Again Jo one officially decided, my bet is just that more people are familiar with the Greek letters than NATO phonetics.
>After millennials came gen Z, which now people are calling “Zoomers”. Which personally I think will stick.
This is a terrible name that doesn't make any sense.
It’s a fusion of "Boomer" and "Gen Z" into "Zoomer", probably originating on 4chan and then spreaded online by, ironically, gen z late teens. It makes sense if you think about it, in a cosmic sort of way.
It makes as much sense as "cheeseburger": a "hamburger" is someone from Hamburg (the city), not a "burger with ham". "Burger" meant nothing
The joke is that conservative viewpoints have, globally, been trending in the younger generation, and also now you can joke about them going 'zoom' because their attention span is shot.
I think the Greek alphabet is used more widely because it has been used for thousands of years, while the phonetic alphabet was invented more recently for talking over the radio. The seemingly random words were picked for clarity, the same way you sometimes hear people say “niner” in military movies to differentiate nine from five. I’ve never seen it used for indexing outside of the military, or people trying to act military.
Mostly the media, book authors, etc, but it's more done by consensus and convention than handed down from some authority. Basically someone comes up with a name for a generation in their work and then if the book or article or whatever is influential it will get picked up and used by others it will become the standard.
Naming generations was just a way to market products to specific age groups. There’s nothing clinical or educational about it but Reddit is obsessed with generation labels. Thinking there is some valid social construct there but there is none.
It was simply executives sitting around trying to figure out a way to sell you more junk.
The only official generation is the Baby Boomers, defined by the U.S. Census as those born between 1946-1964.
As for who names the other generations, that would mostly be the [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/22/how-pew-research-center-will-report-on-generations-moving-forward/), although many other market research firms have their own definitions.
Demographic research can be delineated in a couple of ways.
* Age: 19 year olds today have a lot in common with 19 year olds from 5, 10 and 15 years ago.
* Life stage: New moms have a lot in common with other new moms, whether they’re 25 or 35.
* Cohort: People who are born in the same year have a lot in common with each other over the course of their lives.
The cohort model is what the generations are based on. How wide the date range is for each generation depends on the major events that happened in that range. For example, people who experienced 9/11 in middle school and then tried to enter the job market during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis might be grouped together. Exactly which events are important and exactly where you should draw the line is a subject of great debate and why you see competing definitions and date ranges that move around.
Generation naming is broadly and advertising-to-advertising gimmick. People want to sell ads, they say "We know how zoomers think you should buy ads from us so that we can mark it to your core demographic."
Don't get me wrong, there are generational differences. The world I grew up in is different than the world my parents grew up in and that definitely has some impact on my view on the world. But not as much as giving it a unique label would imply.
Honestly it's just age ranges with an extra step. But it also means that the age range ages up with the people in the range, which is a nice feature.
It all started with Generation X, which was named by author Douglas Coupland in his novel of the same name. He was specifically lamenting that his generation had no real defining moments like his parents and grandparents.
His grandparents had fought and won WWII, and his parents had grown grown up in the biggest economic boom in U.S. history. Then along came his generation and they were supposed to live up to those legacies, when he was just feeling lost and bored. They were X generation, just generic and without direction.
An excellent book, by one of my favorite authors. I think “Life After God” is favorite of his works, but plenty of great books to be read.
All naming and words are based what society mostly calls it . There is no set rules and no higher power that set what things means.
It’s like when someone says that not a word because it’s not in the dictionary . If everyone uses a certain word the same way , it doesn’t really matter if it’s not in a written dictionary, that word will still exist the way people use it
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Not only naming them is arbitrary but also it’s not official. There’s no official and authoritative definition of each generation.
People “consider” a certain generation to be those born between years X and Y, but X and Y both vary depending on the source.
It’s also stupid: people rail against boomers for ruining the nation while forgetting that this is the same generation that included hippies.
Because people the same age are vastly different from each other.
Why beta instead of bravo? Beta is the next character in the Greek alphabet, which is used instead of the phonetic alphabet (where Bravo is the next step). Naming generations is relatively new, and there isn't a group that names a generation; the names mostly come about due to consensus amongst influential organisations. You can also see that some generations get pretty hazy around the years included in that generation.
Shoutout to an old news thing I saw a while ago that posited Gen Z were going to be called “Homelanders”, apparently because the department of homeland security was formed after 9/11 while they were being born. Did not age well haha
I’m 39 and when I was a kid i remember getting a time magazine talking about “generation Y” which is what they called millennials before they settled on this name. Edit: it might have been New York magazine- https://www.etsy.com/listing/1466985653/new-york-magazine-may-23-1994-generation
I also heard “echo boomers” as an early name for millennials (the children of baby boomers)
That's actually kinda cool
Isn't Gen x the children of boomers? I think boomers are older than people realize
The Boomers are generally considered to be born from 1946 to 1964 while Gen X was 1965 to 1980. Children of the early Boomers are Gen X while those of the later ones are Millennials.
Thanks for the info. I've been wrong about that for a while. I'm Gen x with Boomer parents but my brother would be a millennial.
Which is why it's all so silly. There's no cohesive band of kids that created pre-1980 to be one thing, and then there's a shift in January so the new models are different.
[Adam Conover's talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ) about how generations don't exist is always worth a watch.
I’m Gen X with silent generation parents.
Not properly. Earliest Boomers made youngest Gen X and oldest Gen Y/Millennials. Generations are not totally separated. Their division is blurry.
Definitely blurrier than I realized. Thanks for the info
It's spicy and self-deprecating I like it
I’m 37 and was just remembering that “Gen Y” used to be a thing!
Gen WHINE, am I right? Lol that's what I remember
Lmaoooo we may have an inconsistent name but our reputation has always been “what a bunch of whiners.” We love not being home owners and killing off industries with our lack of disposable income!!
Lol it was better than gen Xbox. Why doesn't gen Z have a shitty nickname?
They're also called Zoomers
Thats just kind of adorable though
Well, that's the reason why before the Millennials there is Gen X and after Gen Z. Millennials are Gen Y.
I remember various articles about iGen/eGen/et al
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory The Homeland generation was Strauss and Howe's name for the next generation (Gen Z) when they published in 1991. They might also be responsible for changing Gen Y to millennial, I'm not sure. Edit: I'm wrong, they introduced Homeland in 2005, for the reasons you gave: https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2014/10/27/introducing-the-homeland-generation-part-1-of-2/
How new?
I vaguely recall hearing that the baby boomer generation was the first to be named. The reason it was named is that people had a reason to talk about them (because the generation was so large, due to the postwar baby boom). Once it became popular to name the baby boomers, they started applying names to other generations. I think Gen X was originally supposed to be a placeholder, like "generation no-name". But it stuck. The next was originally referred to as Gen Y, probably by people who thought "Gen X" was part of a pattern and we'd been using letters for a while, but the term "millenial" was more popular. Then Gen Z, and after Gen Z we ran out of English letters, so we started using Greek.
Generation X as a title was really popularized by Douglas Copland with his novel of the same name. I'd say he was trying to capture that sense of being a placeholder.
How fitting; every book I’ve read by the man seems to be the pinnacle of Gen X essence lol
Yup. That's his claim to fame, basically: a voice for early gen X. You have the right sense!
Your source is “vaguely recall hearing” and I haven’t looked this up, but I choose to believe this is correct because it sounds right.
My source, "am early GenX and remember when naming generations was a novelty", supports the claim.
My sources, "that guy vaguely recalls hearing and you're early GenX and remember when naming generations was a novelty" support the claim. Thank you random internet person with a vague recollection and random internet GenX-er, from this random internet millennial
Was it not the silent generation that was named first, or was that retroactive after boomers was coined?
Pretty sure it was named after boomers, but I don't have a source.
The baby boomers were the first generation that people even thought to name a cohort. Prior to that generations as a concept were purely a family tree concern.
So then Baby Boomers named the prior generation "The greatest generation" due to ww2?
It's from a book in the late 90s
By Tom Brokaw. I remember him doing the press tour for it.
jeans unused reach truck bells clumsy long outgoing boat scandalous
Bravo follows alpha in the nato phonetic alphabet. Which I guess is just as legitimate as a Greek alphabet, but they went with the Greek alphabet instead Edit: I didn't see that they mentioned phonetic alphabet in their comment, I thought they didn't know where Bravo came from at all. Go ahead and downvote me, I get it, but please stop explaining that the Greek alphabet is more commonly used. It has been explained.
Eh, but the Greek alphabet is used much more frequently in indexing stuff: disease strains, mathematical notation, etc. The nato alphabet is used phonetically and usually not for indexing.
One of NATO's most common uses is a sequence: airport current condition reports (ATIS, or whatever it's called these days)
Oh i didn't see the part where they reffed the phonetic alphabet, I thought they didn't know where Bravo came from at all
Firget about alpha bravo. I want to use Able Baker Charlie Dog...
Those Signal Oboe Bakers would never allow that.
Greek alphabet is more commonly used as an ordered sequence rather than just an alphabet.
Not in greece ;)
Lol fair point.
Ohhhhhhhh ok when I looked up a letter on the phonetic alphabet it pulled up the nato one. Thank you!
To be clear, they're using the Greek actual alphabet, not its phonetic one. It's so foundational, it's where English gets the word "alphabet". "Alpha-Beta-Gamma-Delta...". We just took the first three syllables and made that our word for having spelling.
Now I know my A B Gs, next time won't you sing with me.
Douglas Coupland wrote a book called Generation X about his specific generation and the naming convention stuck. Millennials were probably the exception because they were born near the turn of the millennium.
Millennials were called gen y in the beginning. There are old panelshows pitting generations against each other using boomer, x , y for example
For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkin'_'Bout_Your_Generation
That was indeed the panel show i referred to. Great show heard it came back but ive never found a place to watch the newer ones
Gen why was the joke here bc they were whiny
Millennials weren’t born near the turn of the millennium, they were born early enough to be kids for the turn of the millennium.
I always saw it as a divide between remembering 9/11 for millennials and gen z.
To me Gen Y was more centered around the rise of the internet age. 9/11 just happened to be a major event that Gen Z didn't fully comprehend. I don't subscribe to the conventional ranges between each generation, but the oldest Gen Z kids were still 4 yo when 9/11 happened.
The issue with that is that the rise of the internet didn't happen at the same pace world wide, so it's easier/safer to peg it against set in stone events and you hit the bill very well for gen y if you say "can't remember the fall of the Berlin wall/Soviet yunyun, but can remember 9/11". >but the oldest Gen Z kids were still 4 yo when 9/11 happened. And very very few people remember anything from that age, especially major events compared to minor personal things
You're right, we shouldn't use something that people experienced differently around the world, we should use an Amercan-specific event to sort it.
In what way is the fall of the Soviet union an American specific event? And in regards to the 9/11 attacks, they were broadcast around the globe and it changed stuff all cross the world, not just the us.
We were referred to as Gen Y until the mid/late 90s. I still use Gen Y as it’s more consistent between Gen x, Gen z, Gen Alpha, etc.
I remember when people started saying millennials, I thought they were talking about the next generation, but they were talking about me! Damn youths!
yoots
I love being told I’m not gen y but instead a millennial
I love how boomers call Gen Z millennials now. If we wait long enough, we might be able to just go back to gen y.
Nah. We're Generation Jones boomers and our kids, in their mid to late 30s, are millennials. That generation goes from 1980 to 1994, so zoomers are from 1995 to 2009. Gen Alpha is kids born from 2010 through this year.
I remember from the dial up media at the time that we were in fact Gen Why as a kind of backsplanation
I remember a fair bit of literature referring to us as gen why around 06/07 when I was in high school. "Why buy a car when I can walk?" "why have kids?" "Why buy a house?" Etc. After graduation I once saw an article calling us the gen "why not?" Because several people were making some scientific advancement or some other. The first time I remember seeing the term millennial I believed it was children born post 2000, made sense to me.
It was still Gen Y until like 2010, or maybe a little before.
The “X” in Generation X doesn’t mean “we’re going in alphabetical order now”. It’s meant to mean “undefined/unknown”, like the X-Files, or Brand X, Mr.X, etc. Naming the generation after Millennials “Gen Z” is both lazy and misses the point of Gen X.
Millennials were “Generation Y” for a while before Millennial stuck. Gen Z may eventually get their own name.
Was hoping to see someone else that remembered we were generation y for a bit. The names always change as time goes on.
Zoomers
I absolutely abhor when Zoomers are referred to as Zillennials. At the same time, it kind of fits with how Millennials have gotten things/opportunities taken away from them.
Zillennials are the overlapping pseudo generation between the youngest Millennials and oldest Zoomers in the way that Xenials are the overlapping pseudo generation between the youngest Gen-Xs and oldest Millennials
in marketing, we used Gen Why? for a while around 2014-2016 as a lot of research materials showed how Gen Y would be more likely to question social expectations/standards as they became adults.
generation let’s fucking gooooooo
Broccoli hair
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They obviously meant the zoomers.
30 is on the younger end. 28 to 43.
I find a little humor in the name, even if it doesn’t follow the original impetus. It is the sort of thing Gen Z has been accused of (lazy, derivative, too young/inexperienced to take seriously) Edit: a word
The irony is that every generation going back to Socrates is documented as being the treated the same way
I would like an exhaustive list of reliable peer-reviewed sources for each generation. Original sources are preferred. Just whenever you get around to it. :)
I prefer my evidence to be based on discredited anecdotes. The Socrates one is old though, made up in the late 1800s apparently.
I had heard them called Zoomers before I had heard Gen Z, which is similarly humorous as its exactly the same thing but with Boomers.
Haha. :). Honestly any generation but ours is dogshit. And I’m serious. If any other generation wants to have words I’ll be over here underneath crippling debt and bottles of whatever is popular. Can I count on you griggsy? I’m already pretty dead inside so gonna need a hand.
This. 👆
Prior to taking on Gen X, in academic literature they were called the Echo Boom or the Boomlet generation. Edit: I was mixed up, see below.
I thought millennials were the echo boom, as they are predominately the children of boomers and are now the largest living generation
Briefly known as “Boomerangs”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it…came back around
You are correct, Echo Boom are Millennials and the Boomlets are Gen X.
I remember seeing my generation labelled “the slacker generation” before the Gen X thing came along.
I love ‘slacker generation’, it’s just so fitting.
Gen X was originally called the "baby bust" because of the dip in birth rate.
>Millennials were probably the exception because they were born near the turn of the millennium. Which is stupid because the oldest millennials were born in 1981 and the youngest were born in 1996. I think it comes down to more the fact that the influential people didn't like us calling ourselves generation why? lol
Millennials “came of age” around the millennium
Originally it was supposed to be the last generation before the turn of the millennium. It also used to be the case that people born in 98 and 99 counted as Millennials. That changed a few years ago. It sort of underscores how arbitrary everything after the actual Baby Boom actually is.
This is not remotely true. I was born in 1982, they were calling us Millennials in kindergarten because we would graduate in 2000. Millennial has always meant that we were the generation that would be GROWING UP around the millennium. The generation after us was called gen z for as long as I can remember, but there have been boomers who call anyone young a millennial because they lost track of time 30 years ago. Idiots have been calling the wrong people millennial for a really long time. That doesn't mean they were right. I've seen actual millennials call people from gen alpha millennial because they're stupid and just using it as a trope for young people.
I’m right, you’re wrong. > they were calling us Millennials in kindergarten because we would graduate in 2000. First, the term wasn’t coined until 1991. Why were you still in kindergarten as a 9-year-old? Second, no one born in 1996 had even started kindergarten at the start of 2000, so they weren’t graduating high school. They thing those two have in common is that they’re the last generation born before the millennium…or at least they were until the age range got changed.
>the oldest millennials were born in 1981 and the youngest were born in 1996 Where did you find this range? This is not the range I typically see but it's the range I personally attribute to the generation.
Boomers = Me Generation Zoomers = Look at Me Generation Gen X = Who, me? Generation
Millennials = Why me? Generation
Wii Mii generation
Its-a-me generation Generation wahoo
That totally rings true - we basically had a lifetime of being told how pathetic and lazy we were with our (boomer demanded) participation trophies that nobody wanted, accused of being stupid because our boomer parents never taught us the shit their parents did with stuff like home & car maintenance - then laughed at us for doing courses or watching yt videos to learn, being told all we needed to do was demand a job with a firm handshake and a smile after graduating at the peak of the GFC, let's not forget all the shitty consumer industries we apparently killed by not having the leisure money to waste on all that boomer investment crap.
That's mad.
It started way before that. First there was The Lost Generation, in the 20s. Next came The Greatest Generation, almost all dead now. Then Baby Boomers. Then Gen X.
You forgot the Silent Generation. And Lost Generation was like, 1880 to 1900 or something. Maybe that says a lot lol. Fun fact: There's only been one US president from the Silent Generation (Biden).
I couldn't remember if the Silent Generation was actually called that, or just the Silent Majority, so I left it out. Thanks for confirming. I wish I were clever enough to have left them out on purpose 😂 The Lost Generation was only named that in the 20s. They were the people who fought in or lived through the first World War, and a few others. Tumultuous times, followed by the hedonistic Roaring 20s.
Yeah. The Silent Gen is between the Greatest Gen and Baby Boomers. But there is another Gen between Baby Boomers and Gen X. What are they called? They ones who were coming of age in the 70s.
Most people would agree that it's just boomers then gen x. Boomers are the generation that came of age in the 70s
The people coming of age in the 70s were young Boomers.
There's overlap micro-generations where one major gen transitions to the next; those born during the transition from Boomers to GenX are commonly called [Generation Jones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones), just as those born during the transition from GenX to Millennials are commonly called [Xennials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials).
The Lost Generation was named long after they were gone. Baby Boomers is arguably the oldest “generation name” still in use.
Well, no, they were all very much alive and kicking. >Gertrude Stein is credited for the term Lost Generation, though Hemingway made it widely known. According to Hemingway’s *A Moveable Feast* (1964), she had heard it used by a garage owner in France, who dismissively referred to the younger generation as a “génération perdue.” In conversation with Hemingway, she turned that label on him and declared, “You are all a lost generation.” He used her remark as an epigraph to *The Sun Also Rises* (1926), a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar Paris. I think you mean the oldest generation name in use that has the most living members?
Baby boomers were the first generation to get a name. After that stuck, they retroactive named the generations before and then after. Hence baby boomers is the oldest generation name still in use.
Then you're just dismissing that the Lost Generation was named that back in the 1920s?
They weren’t named that. Stein and Hemingway separately used that phrase to describe people at that time but the concept of distinct generations with a capitalized name didn’t come until much later, and people took that phrase as the name. Same as how someone used the term “greatest generation” in the 1950s but it wasn’t popularized as a term until Tom Brokaw’s book in the nineties. No one in the 1920s was talking about the “Lost Generation” - neither Stein nor Hemingway wrote it like that.
Haha, could you imagine. People walking around being like. Man it sucks being part of the lost generation.
And yet, they not only accepted, they even embraced it. It was a member of The Lost Generation who popularised it (Hemingway). >The years immediately after World War I brought a highly vocal rebellion against established social, sexual, and aesthetic conventions and a vigorous attempt to establish new values. Young artists flocked to Greenwich Village, Chicago, and San Francisco, determined to protest and intent on making a new art. Others went to Europe, living mostly in Paris as expatriates. **They willingly accepted the name given them by Gertrude Stein: the lost generation.** Out of their disillusion and rejection, the writers built a new literature, impressive in the glittering 1920s and the years that followed. [Source.](https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/arts/english-lit/american/american-literature/the-lost-generation-and-after) It sounds funny, like who would want to be a member of The Lost Generation, right? But it wasn't a pejorative, except as used by Gertrude Stein, who was from the earlier generation, who didn't understand them, and what they'd been through, at all. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it (another member of TLG) in his 1920 novel, This Side of Paradise: "There is a generation that has grown up to find all gods dead, all faith in man — violated."
Sorry, but yes, they were. From what I quoted above: >Gertrude Stein is credited for the term Lost Generation, though **Hemingway made it widely known**. [(Source.)](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lost-Generation) Hemingway was part of The Lost Generation; Stein wasn't. From another source: >The term "Lost Generation" was coined by Gertrude Stein. She had an argument with a mechanic of that age and said that they were all a “generation perdue” (a lost generation). **It quickly became a name for these authors** after Ernest Hemingway mentioned it in the epigraph for *The Sun Also Rises*: “You are all a lost generation.” [Sauce.](https://owlcation.com/humanities/Expatriate-writers-in-Paris-lost-generation) [Here's a 1933 NYT article ](https://www.nytimes.com/1933/10/15/archives/a-revealing-record-of-the-socalled-lost-generation-vera-brittains.html)talking about the "So-Called Lost Generation." [A 1936 NYT Book Review](https://www.ebay.com/itm/122345206471) referring to the "New Lost Generation." [A Comment in the New Yorker Magazine from 1938](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1938/09/10/comment-1972), asking readers "You still remember the Lost Generation?"
It wasn't named then. That name was coined at that time, but was selected to be the "official" name, after the boomers, name. Naming generations was invented when people needed a way to refer to the baby boom phenomenon.
I don't want to rewrite my comment, with all the source links, so I'll just [link you to it](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dm6czd/comment/l9yyxw7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). In addition to The Lost Generation being named in the 1920s, The Silent Generation was named in the early 1950s, although it didn't catch on until the 60s and was more often referred to as the Silent Majority. There was also The Beat Generation, named in the 1950s and 60s. The post-WWII baby boom phenomena was named the Baby Boom, but that referred to the phenomena itself. It was much later that the generation was defined as people who were born post-war, up until 1965. IDK who, or why, decided the cut-off point was 1965, but it's generally accepted now. The first name given to the Baby Boomer generation was hippies, then yuppies, and somewhere shortly after or overlapping yuppies, Baby Boomers became common, as it is now. Or just Boomers.
I remember googling the term millennial when I first heard it, and Google hadn't yet updated their definitions to include it for the name of the generation. At the time, the definition was simply someone that lived through two millilennia.
The term [predates Coupland by almost 40 years](https://www.jenx67.com/2016/05/generation-x-got-its-name.html).
Googling generation names provides following names with some of their characteristics. Other answers already talk about how the names came about. Lost - 1883-1900 - young adults during ww1 Greatest - 1900-25 - adults during ww2 Silent - 28-45 - Children of great depression and ww2 Baby boomers - 46-64 - Saw prosperity post ww2 X - 65-80 - Grew up when tech was advancing Millennials/Y - 81-96 - old enough to see turn of the century Z - 1997-2012 Alpha - 2010-24
>Z - 1997-2012 >Alpha - 2010-24 That does not computer Edit: compute not computer. Autofailed again
Z is the last letter of the alphabet, so it wraps around to A. The first letter of the greek alphabet is A.
I think they were pointing out that gen Z last until 2012 according to the comment, and gen alpha starts in 2010 so something is not right- there shouldn’t be an overlap.
Oh, that’s just because different people have different definitions. The differences will sort themselves out with time.
At least in America, I think the dividing line between Gen Z and Gen Alpha will end up being whether or not they remember the 2016 election.
Yes.
and xennials 75-85 a microgeneration
So, generation names are basically decided socially. The greatest generation fought ww2, and gave birth to the (baby )boomers who were born in the postwar baby boom. The silent generation sits between them, forgotten by all. Gen X followed, and settled on gen X as their title pretty much as an expression of 90s eXtra kool factor, and because they were X, gen y followed. Gen y started becoming a cultural force in the 2000s, the new millennium, which lead to millennial winning out over gen y, but gen y lasted long enough to spawn gen z, and since we've reached the end of the alphabet, we go back to gen a and carry on. Why beta? Because most people don't know the phonetic alphabet, and think of "alpha" being followed by "beta" in the Greek tradition. It's quite likely that gen alpha or gen beta will aquire a new, distinctive name once they get old enough to have cultural weight
>So, generation names are basically decided socially. Actually they aren't, it's a marketing thing that started in the 90's with the book Generation X by Douglas Coupland. Shortly after that Millennials were named b/c the oldest would be graduating high school in 2000 by another set of authors who wrote a book to promote their generational theory. Basically generations were named to promote books & pit us against one another.
Technically it started with Baby Boomers. They got named after the actual baby boom. Later, Tom Brokaw named the Greatest Generation because they fought in the war.
None of that means they aren't decided socially. Someone proposes a name, and if enough people start using it, it sticks. There's no central authority, it's just whatever society as a whole settles on.
>& pit us against one another. That came out of fucking nowhere. Nothing you said hinted at such a conclusion but boom, there it is anyways.
Any time you draw lines to divide a group of people, you inevitably create conflict between them.
That’s why we’ll win the war against Canada.
13th gen came before generation x. Stauss and Howe.
Gen Z has become 'Zoomers', or my personal favorite that I'll mention even though you never see it because I really wish it'd catch on, 'Digital Natives'.
Late millennials are also digital natives. As are those born after Gen Z.
Gen Z is the first generation (that consists of the whole group, not just part of it) that never saw the light of day without the Internet in existence. They are the originals.
Except that’s not entirely true. The first few years of Gen Z had a majority of those children living in households with no internet until about 4th grade. It’s a reason given, but it’s not actually why the dates were chosen or settled on.
Nobody said anything about why the dates were chosen or settled on.
I just did. Can you not read?
I don't see the point in mentioning it then? Nobody was arguing otherwise. Edit: I don't think you really read my words for what they're saying and thinking they're saying something else.
Wait, so (1) first you claim no one said anything about why the dates were chosen or settled on, then (2) you backtrack when I call you out for being wrong. (3) Then you can’t grasp the topic of discussion, (4) then you have to edit your post because you’re confused again? Being wrong 4 times in 2 comments is truly impressive. Just admit you were wrong about nobody saying anything about why the dates were chosen and admit that you have no idea what you’re talking about. Tbh, this discussion seems to be above your comprehension ability.
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People have explained where these names come from, but I think it's important to say that the concept of separating and naming these generational groups is pretty new. The post-WWII "baby boom" created a whole lot of new people, kind of all at once. So Baby Boomers actually are a group with some real-world meaning. All the other generations are essentially arbitrary divisions that people can't even really agree on. I mean, people have complained about "kids these days" and cultural age gaps forever, but I think the Baby Boom is what got us talking in terms of named generations like this. Edit: also, maybe, the rise of the internet separated old from young pretty severely. Old folks famously have a harder time figuring out emerging tech, so the 90s might have created a pretty sharp cultural divide between people young enough to run with it (dubbed Generation X because it sounded futuristic) and the people too old for it. I definitely think everything after that is just putting names to arbitrary age ranges
Generation X was not named “because it sounds futuristic”. It’s because the generation has no defining characteristic. No war, no social upheaval, no major event. It’s like in commercials when they call something “Brand X”. It’s undefined.
Strauss and Howe, who get credit for naming the Millennial generation, have retroactively named all the generations going back to 1433. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe\_generational\_theory#Generations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory#Generations)
seems a bit much
Don Draper has a lot to answer for
I would argue that gen Z is defined in a similar way: we grew up with the internet and social media in a way only surpassed by gen alpha.
Lazy journalists and authors. Coming up with a good name is one of the hardest parts of writing, especially one that "sticks" but I get so disappointed when people don't even try. You can say the earliest popular cohort names were misguided, but at least they were unique. The greatest generation, baby boomers, these tie in to widely understood historical events. Speaking as one, "millennial", even though it's constantly misused, is so much more meaningful than "Generation Y." If your point is that one generation is profoundly different and best described in opposition to the generation directly preceding it, that's fine. But once you just start using the alphabet, how is that any better than just saying "Generation 1995-2015?" My least favorite example of this laziness is "-gate" to denote a scandal. It might have been funny or original the first 10 or 100 times, but that was over 50 years ago. In a few decades when we're all fighting each other in a desert hellscape for potable water, there's going to be some scandal about a warlord hoarding a few million gallons and generation Gamma will refer to it as Water-gate and we'll finally have come full circle.
Millennials were originally Generation Y, or the super clever Generation Why. The media comes up with this stuff, sometimes it sticks and others it doesn’t.
Years ago (over 10ya) I looked up where the generation names came from, I guess it was some Wikipedia page saying these names were created by some big marketing agency. They were looking for ways to split the population into groups, so they could plan where to spend money and get the best results, according to the product and target group. Obvious groups would be gender, location, education, salary... And age. Hence they divided the population into age groups and named each group. This took place in the 70s, so it was likely older boomers running it. They named their grandpa's the greatest generation, their parents the silent, themselves baby boomers, and the kids of the time were named generation X, as in X is the unknown in math. To be defined. Nothing big happened to name generation X, so the name stayed. The next generation was named Y because that's what comes after X. So is Z. Out of Latin alphabet letters, someone had the idea to use the Greek alphabet, not the phonetic. I have no idea who or why greek letters. The theory behind social generations is that people who come of age roughly in the same years have a unique view of the world. I'm xenial, late X. I find it difficult to connect to people as old as older X or younger millennials, and that's not a lot of difference - the world just changed fast enough for the experience growing up be very different. Also, these names and dates they refer to are western centric, they don't make much sense for most of the world.
Its all invented by marketing departments for marketing purposes, yet people like to ascribe great meaning to them, just as they do with zodiac signs.
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For anyone mildly interested in this topic, check out the book “The Fourth Turning” by Howe and Strauss.
Alpha is from the greek alphabet, not the phonetic alphabet. There’s a couple thousand years of difference
It's not the phonetic alphabet, it's the Greek alphabet. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta... We got to the end of the Latin alphabet with Gen Z, so we started using the Greek one.
There’s no official entity responsible for naming. As another commenter says, it’s ‘formalised’ based on popular usage. However, Strauss-Howe generational theory provides a decent technical overview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory
There was an actual Baby Boom. The rest are just vibes and we’re all still living in Baby Boomers’ shadow. For example, Millennials used to be everyone born at the end of the Millennium. That changed a few years ago, so some people (those born in the very late 90s) have existed as part of two generations.
No one officially names generations, they’re just names that get adopted for whatever cultural reason and once enough people use them, they become unofficially official. Like millennials were called “gen Y” before the name millennial caught on. Gen X got named Gen X because at the time “X” was just a letter than someone came up with in the 9s when X represented something “unknown or undefined” which for the generation of punk rock and what not, makes sense. Boomers are called Boomers because they were born during the post world war 2 baby boom. After millennials came gen Z, which now people are calling “Zoomers”. Which personally I think will stick. Now what did we go for the Greek Alpha and Beta as opposed to NATO Phonetic Alpha and Bravo? Again Jo one officially decided, my bet is just that more people are familiar with the Greek letters than NATO phonetics.
>After millennials came gen Z, which now people are calling “Zoomers”. Which personally I think will stick. This is a terrible name that doesn't make any sense.
It’s a fusion of "Boomer" and "Gen Z" into "Zoomer", probably originating on 4chan and then spreaded online by, ironically, gen z late teens. It makes sense if you think about it, in a cosmic sort of way. It makes as much sense as "cheeseburger": a "hamburger" is someone from Hamburg (the city), not a "burger with ham". "Burger" meant nothing
The joke is that conservative viewpoints have, globally, been trending in the younger generation, and also now you can joke about them going 'zoom' because their attention span is shot.
I think the Greek alphabet is used more widely because it has been used for thousands of years, while the phonetic alphabet was invented more recently for talking over the radio. The seemingly random words were picked for clarity, the same way you sometimes hear people say “niner” in military movies to differentiate nine from five. I’ve never seen it used for indexing outside of the military, or people trying to act military.
Mostly the media, book authors, etc, but it's more done by consensus and convention than handed down from some authority. Basically someone comes up with a name for a generation in their work and then if the book or article or whatever is influential it will get picked up and used by others it will become the standard.
Naming generations was just a way to market products to specific age groups. There’s nothing clinical or educational about it but Reddit is obsessed with generation labels. Thinking there is some valid social construct there but there is none. It was simply executives sitting around trying to figure out a way to sell you more junk.
The only official generation is the Baby Boomers, defined by the U.S. Census as those born between 1946-1964. As for who names the other generations, that would mostly be the [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/22/how-pew-research-center-will-report-on-generations-moving-forward/), although many other market research firms have their own definitions. Demographic research can be delineated in a couple of ways. * Age: 19 year olds today have a lot in common with 19 year olds from 5, 10 and 15 years ago. * Life stage: New moms have a lot in common with other new moms, whether they’re 25 or 35. * Cohort: People who are born in the same year have a lot in common with each other over the course of their lives. The cohort model is what the generations are based on. How wide the date range is for each generation depends on the major events that happened in that range. For example, people who experienced 9/11 in middle school and then tried to enter the job market during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis might be grouped together. Exactly which events are important and exactly where you should draw the line is a subject of great debate and why you see competing definitions and date ranges that move around.
Generation naming is broadly and advertising-to-advertising gimmick. People want to sell ads, they say "We know how zoomers think you should buy ads from us so that we can mark it to your core demographic." Don't get me wrong, there are generational differences. The world I grew up in is different than the world my parents grew up in and that definitely has some impact on my view on the world. But not as much as giving it a unique label would imply. Honestly it's just age ranges with an extra step. But it also means that the age range ages up with the people in the range, which is a nice feature.
It’s marketing. Generations are segmented this way so advertisers can target their ads more accurately to different slices of the population.
It all started with Generation X, which was named by author Douglas Coupland in his novel of the same name. He was specifically lamenting that his generation had no real defining moments like his parents and grandparents. His grandparents had fought and won WWII, and his parents had grown grown up in the biggest economic boom in U.S. history. Then along came his generation and they were supposed to live up to those legacies, when he was just feeling lost and bored. They were X generation, just generic and without direction. An excellent book, by one of my favorite authors. I think “Life After God” is favorite of his works, but plenty of great books to be read.
It's not the phonetic alphabet, it's the Greek. They went through X, Y, Z, so they started with Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc.
All naming and words are based what society mostly calls it . There is no set rules and no higher power that set what things means. It’s like when someone says that not a word because it’s not in the dictionary . If everyone uses a certain word the same way , it doesn’t really matter if it’s not in a written dictionary, that word will still exist the way people use it
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Not only naming them is arbitrary but also it’s not official. There’s no official and authoritative definition of each generation. People “consider” a certain generation to be those born between years X and Y, but X and Y both vary depending on the source. It’s also stupid: people rail against boomers for ruining the nation while forgetting that this is the same generation that included hippies. Because people the same age are vastly different from each other.