Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with the generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996.<!-- This range is based on the sources given in the text below; please seek talk page consensus before changing --> Most millennials are the children of baby boomers and older members of Generation X, and are often the parents of members of Generation Z and Generation Alpha.
As children in the late 1980s to 2000s, millennials saw the rise of the Information Age and Internet, As adolescents and young adults in the late 1990s to 2010s, the generation was marked by a more upbeat youth culture, elevated familiarity with the Internet and technology in general, and usage of early social media platforms such as AOL Instant Messenger, LiveJournal, and Myspace. Between the 1990s and 2010s, people from developing countries became increasingly well-educated, a factor that boosted economic growth in these countries. in the wake of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 recession. They have been called the "Unluckiest Generation" in the US and other Western countries, as the average millennial has experienced slower economic growth and more recessions since entering the workforce than any other generation in history. Across the globe, millennials and subsequent generations have postponed marriage or living together as a couple. Those in developing countries will continue to constitute the bulk of global population growth. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, known for creating the Strauss–Howe generational theory, are widely credited with naming the millennials. They coined the term in 1987, around the time children born in 1982 were entering kindergarten, and the media were first identifying their prospective link to the impending new millennium as the high school graduating class of 2000. and Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (2000).
In August 1993, an Advertising Age editorial coined the phrase Generation Y to describe teenagers of the day, then aged 13–19 (born 1974–1980), who were at the time defined as different from Generation X. However, the 1974–1980 cohort was later re-identified by most media sources as the last wave of Generation X, and by 2003 Ad Age had moved their Generation Y starting year up to 1982. According to journalist Bruce Horovitz, in 2012, Ad Age "threw in the towel by conceding that Millennials is a better name than Gen Y,"
Millennials are sometimes called Echo Boomers, due to them often being the offspring of the baby boomers, the increase in birth rates from the early 1980s to mid-1990s, and their generation's large size comparable to that of boomers. In the United States, the echo boom's birth rates peaked in August 1990 Alternative names for this group include the Net Generation, Generation 9/11, Generation Next, Generation Me, and The Burnout Generation.
In 2018, Emily St. James, writing in Vox, complained that the word "millennial" had become meaningless. The term was then being habitually applied to all teenagers, even if they were actually members of Generation Z rather than Generation Y; it was also being indiscriminately applied to members of Generation X. As of 2015 and 2017, it was reported that some people considered the word "millennial" to be an insult.
Date and age range definitions
Oxford Living Dictionaries describes a millennial as a person "born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s". Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines millennial as "a person born in the 1980s or 1990s". Jonathan Rauch, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote for The Economist in 2018 that "generations are squishy concepts", but the 1981 to 1996 birth cohort is a "widely accepted" definition for millennials. Encyclopædia Britannica defines millennials as "the term used to describe a person born between 1981 and 1996, though different sources can vary by a year or two." The U.S. Census have said that "there is no official start and end date for when millennials were born" and they do not officially define millennials, but noted in 2022 that millennials are "colloquially defined as the cohort born from 1981 to 1996."
The Pew Research Center defines millennials as the people born from 1981 to 1996, choosing these dates for "key political, economic and social factors", including memory of the 11 September terrorist attacks, and impact of the war on terror, Great Recession, and rise of the Internet. The United States Library of Congress explains that date ranges are 'subjective' and the traits of each cohort are generalized based around common economic, social, or political factors that happened during formative years. They acknowledge disagreements, complaints over date ranges, generation names, and the overgeneralized "personality" of each generation. However, they cite Pew's 1981–1996 definition to define millennials. Various media outlets, think tanks, and statistical organizations have cited or used the 1981–1996 definition, including the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Brookings Institution, Gallup, the Federal Reserve Board, and Statistics Canada.
Psychologist Jean Twenge defines millennials as those born from 1980 to 1994. Likewise, Australia's McCrindle Research uses 1980 to 1994 as Generation Y (millennial) birth years. The Australian Bureau of Statistics uses the years 1981 to 1995 to define millennials in a 2021 Census report. A 2023 report by the Population Reference Bureau defines millennials as those born from 1981 to 1999. CNN reports that studies sometimes define millennials as born between 1980 and 2000. A 2017 BBC report has also referred to this age range in reference to that used by National Records of Scotland. In the UK, the Resolution Foundation uses 1981–2000. The U.S. Government Accountability Office defines millennials as those born between 1982 and 2000. Sociologist Elwood Carlson, who calls the generation "New Boomers", identified the birth years of 1983–2001, based on the upswing in births after 1983 and finishing with the "political and social challenges" that occurred after the 11 September terrorist acts. Author Neil Howe, co-creator of the Strauss–Howe generational theory, defines millennials as "born 1982–2005?".
The cohorts born during the cusp years before and after millennials have been identified as "microgenerations" with characteristics of both generations. Names given to these cuspers include Xennials, Generation Catalano, the Oregon Trail Generation; Zennials and Zillennials, respectively.
Psychology
Psychologist Jean Twenge, the author of the 2006 book Generation Me, considers millennials, along with younger members of Generation X, to be part of what she calls "Generation Me". Twenge attributes millennials with the traits of confidence and tolerance, but also describes a sense of entitlement and narcissism, based on NPI surveys showing increased narcissism among millennials compared to preceding generations when they were teens and in their twenties. Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett of Clark University, Worcester has criticized Twenge's research on narcissism among millennials, stating "I think she is vastly misinterpreting or over-interpreting the data, and I think it's destructive". He doubts that the Narcissistic Personality Inventory really measures narcissism at all. Arnett says that not only are millennials less narcissistic, they're "an exceptionally generous generation that holds great promise for improving the world". A study published in 2017 in the journal Psychological Science found a small decline in narcissism among young people since the 1990s.
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe argue that each generation has common characteristics that give it a specific character with four basic generational archetypes, repeating in a cycle. According to their hypothesis, they predicted millennials would become more like the "civic-minded" G.I. Generation with a strong sense of community both local and global. In addition, psychologist Jean Twenge says Strauss and Howe's assertions are overly deterministic, non-falsifiable, and unsupported by rigorous evidence.
Though it is often said that millennials ignore conventional advertising, they are in fact heavily influenced by it. They are particularly sensitive to appeals to transparency, to experiences rather than things, and flexibility.
A 2015 study by Microsoft found that 77% of respondents aged 18 to 24 said yes to the statement, "When nothing is occupying my attention, the first thing I do is reach for my phone," compared to just 10% for those aged 65 and over.
The term has been used to denote anxiety experienced by many Japanese millennials struggling with a sense of disconnectedness and self-blaming, caused by a vast array of issues from unemployment, poverty, family problems, bullying, social withdrawal and mental ill-health.
Millennial optimism
Millennial optimism is a 2020s cultural trend and neologism that emerged on TikTok in 2025. The term has been described as encompassing late Generation Z's nostalgia for 2010s millennial youth culture and has been connected to the 2026 is the new 2016 trend. The phrase "millennial cringe" was originally used by Generation Z to disparage millennial youth culture in the 2010s, which British GQ noted contemptuous towards the millennial generation's "tendency towards sincerity".
Cognitive abilities
Intelligence researcher James R. Flynn discovered that back in the 1950s, the gap between the vocabulary levels of adults and children was much smaller than it is in the early twenty-first century. Between 1953 and 2006, adult gains on the vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler IQ test were 17.4 points whereas the corresponding gains for children were only 4. He asserted that some of the reasons for this are the surge in interest in higher education and cultural changes. The number of Americans pursuing tertiary qualifications and cognitively demanding jobs has risen significantly since the 1950s. This boosted the level of vocabulary among adults. Back in the 1950s, children generally imitated their parents and adopted their vocabulary. This was no longer the case in the 2000s, when teenagers often developed their own subculture and as such were less likely to use adult-level vocabulary on their essays.
In a 2009 report, Flynn analyzed the results of the Raven's Progressive Matrices test for British fourteen-year-olds from 1980 to 2008. He discovered that their average IQ had dropped by more than two points during that time period. Among those in the higher half of the intelligence distribution, the decline was even more significant, six points. This is a clear case of the reversal of the Flynn effect, the apparent rise in IQ scores observed during the twentieth century. Flynn suspected that this was due to changes in British youth culture. He further noted that in the past, IQ gains had been correlated with socioeconomic class, but this was no longer true.
Psychologists Jean Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Ryne A. Sherman analyzed vocabulary test scores on the U.S. General Social Survey (<math>n = 29,912</math>) and found that after correcting for education, the use of sophisticated vocabulary has declined between the mid-1970s and the mid-2010s across all levels of education, from below high school to graduate school.