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yuppie, term used most frequently in the 1980s and ’90s to describe college-educated young professionals. Yuppie is short for “young urban professional” or “young upwardly mobile professional.” These individuals were typically of the American baby boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) and worked high-paying jobs in cities. Yuppie started as a fairly neutral expression, but its connotations shifted toward the negative, especially as it began to be associated with social issues regarded as problematic, such as gentrification. Since its peak in the early 1990s, yuppie has largely been phased out as a descriptor, though the term remains familiar to a large number of Americans.

The neologism yuppie was likely used and spread colloquially by word of mouth before appearing in print, probably for the first time in a 1980 issue of Chicago Magazine. Journalist Dan Rottenberg, who did not take credit for coining the term, used it in his article about a growing trend of individuals moving into fashionable neighborhoods in Chicago. Indeed, at the time, much of the media was hyping a reversal of so-called white flight, suggesting that baby boomers, characterized as a generation of former hippies who were then entering their 30s, were shifting away from the suburbanized notion of the American dream of their parents and toward a new idealized urban lifestyle.

~Britannica