Nobody agrees exactly when Generation Z begins, or what to call it
Zoomers, iGen, Homelanders, Centennials: the cohort after Millennials has collected more nicknames than almost any before it. Even its birth years shift depending on who is counting, from 1995 in Japan and Australia to 1997 at Pew. The one label that stuck came from simply continuing the alphabet.
Generation X was followed by Generation Y, the Millennials, so the next letter was an easy choice. Rivals were plentiful. Psychologist Jean Twenge wanted to call her 2006 book about Millennials iGeneration, but her publisher insisted on Generation Me, so she saved the idea for her 2017 book iGen. William Strauss and Neil Howe, the pair behind a well-known theory of generational cycles, ran a naming contest in 2005 and settled on Homelanders, after the security measures put in place following the September 11 attacks. When Pew checked Google Trends in 2019, Generation Z won easily in the United States.
The nickname Zoomer took off in 2018 through a 4chan meme that used a Wojak cartoon to tease teenagers, although Merriam-Webster traced it back to at least 2016. It entered Dictionary.com in January 2020 and Merriam-Webster in October 2021. Oddly, the word once described unusually energetic Baby Boomers.
Boundaries are even messier. Pew picked 1997 as the first year, reasoning that these children grew up after 9/11 amid new technology, and tentatively used 2012 as the last. McCrindle Research in Australia prefers 1995 to 2009, Japan's statistics bureau used 1995 to 2010 in its 2020 census, and Twenge's own range runs from 1995 to 2012. People born on the Millennial border are sometimes called Zillennials, and those at the far edge, touching Generation Alpha, get the name Zalphas.
Whatever the dates, this was the first cohort to grow up with Web 2.0 already in place, watching YouTube and playing online as children. Being called digital natives did not guarantee digital skills, though. A 2016 study of over 20,000 people aged 15 to 21 across twenty countries found that 59 percent were happy with their lives overall, ranging from 90 percent in Indonesia to 28 percent in Japan. Money and school topped the list of worries.
Source: Generation Z
