From the Lost Generation to Gen Beta: How every generation got its name

That is a long way from how this used to work. The Lost Generation got its name secondhand, from a French garage owner, via Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. A network news anchor named the Greatest Generation more than half a century after it went to war.

There’s no official process for naming a generation; it’s more like a cultural quorum is reached, and a name takes hold, even though it’s never technically fixed. The moniker for tens of millions of people born within a couple of decades of one another can come from a magazine essay, a novel, or a research firm. The only real key to a name sticking is that lots of people start using it.

The labels carry real money. McCrindle, the research firm behind Gen Alpha, projects that cohort will command $5.46 trillion in spending power by 2029. They also shape how managers size up young workers, a habit one Fortune commentary argued hurts Gen Z at work.

Even the people who measure generations are cautious about the boxes. In 2023, Pew Research Center said it would apply generational labels more selectively, warning that the standard definitions “may be too broad and arbitrary to capture differences that exist among narrower cohorts.”

From a French garage to a news anchor’s bestseller

The first widely recognized named generation in Western culture was the Lost Generation, generally dated to births between 1883 and 1900. Its members came of age during World War I, which killed millions of young men, and many of those who survived came home disillusioned with the values they had been raised on.

The origin story may be partly apocryphal. According to Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast, as Britannica recounts it, Stein heard a garage owner in France dismiss the young men of the day as a “génération perdue.” She turned the line on Hemingway: “You are all a lost generation.” He used it as the epigraph to his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, and it stuck.

The next named generation, usually dated to births from 1901 to 1927, is called the Greatest Generation. Its members lived through the Great Depression and fought or worked through World War II. The name comes from NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, who described how he came to call World War II veterans the Greatest Generation after covering the 40th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy in 1984. He made it the title of his 1998 bestseller.

The Silent Generation, born from 1928 to 1945, followed. Its name was popularized by a November 1951 Time essay, “The Younger Generation,” which noted, “It has been called the ‘Silent Generation.’” Members of this cadre were generally seen as more conformist, cautious, and quiet than their predecessors, which makes sense given the chill of the early Cold War.

A birth spike and a mathematical variable

Next came a generation with many members still alive and well today: the Baby Boomers. Born from 1946 through 1964, they numbered about 67 million as of mid-2024, roughly 20% of the U.S. population, according to Pew; the oldest turn 80 this year.

The name needs little decoding. Birthrates veritably exploded after World War II: per History.com, 3.4 million babies were born in the U.S. in 1946, 20% more than in 1945. Annual births topped 4 million every year from 1954 to 1964.

Generation X followed, born from 1965 to 1980. The term had floated around for decades, including in a Robert Capa photo essay after World War II and as the name of Billy Idol’s punk band. It wasn’t cemented until Douglas Coupland’s debut novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, came out in 1991. The X, fittingly, signaled a generation that resisted definition, like a variable in an equation.

Millennials, Gen Z, and the end of the alphabet

Millennials, born from 1981 to 1996, came of age right around the turn of the millennium. Historians Neil Howe and William Strauss coined the term in their 1991 book Generations, because the cohort would be the first to graduate high school in 2000. “We thought that an upbeat name would be good because of the changing way they were being raised,” Howe told NPR in 2014. The pair built on the idea in their 2000 book Millennials Rising.

For a while the same cohort was also called Generation Y, a label Advertising Age used in a 1993 editorial, but it never really stuck.

Some have argued for a so-called microgeneration couched between Gen X and Millennials. Xennials, a term writer Sarah Stankorb coined in Good magazine in 2014, describes people born roughly from 1977 to 1983, who grew up before computers were common and adapted to them as adults. A similar in-between group, the Zillennials, born roughly 1993 to 1998, straddles Millennials and Gen Z.

Following the Millennials came Gen Z, born from 1997 to 2012, by Pew’s definition. Its name is the logical follow-on to X and Y. Its nickname, Zoomers, is a riff on “boomer” that Merriam-Webster traces to at least 2016, well before pandemic-era video calls. The word had an earlier life, too: a 2003 Fortune story used “zoomers” for empty-nesters with spare money to spend.

Greek letters, assigned in advance

With the Latin alphabet used up, Generation Alpha took the first letter of the Greek one. The name comes from social researcher and demographer Mark McCrindle, who popularized it in his 2009 book The ABC of XYZ: Understanding the Global Generations. Alphas, born from 2010 to 2024, are the first cohort born entirely in the 21st century, so the “first” in alpha makes sense.

Next is Generation Beta, the cohort born, or to be born, between 2025 and 2039, by McCrindle’s definition. A memorable book or persuasive article could always give the Betas a title that better fits the zeitgeist. But generations once got their monikers years after their last members were born, and this one was named before its first.

Whether Beta sticks is still up to the rest of us. Generation Y had a name, too.