Millennials
Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.
Terminology
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote about the Millennials in Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, and they released an entire book devoted to them, titled Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. Strauss and Howe are "widely credited with naming the Millennials" according to journalist Bruce Horovitz. In 1987, they coined the term "around the time '82-born children were entering preschool and the media were first identifying their prospective link to the millennial year 2000". Strauss and Howe use 1982 as the Millennials' starting birth year and 2004 as the last birth year.
In August 1993, the phrase Generation Y first appeared in an Ad Age editorial to describe those who were aged 11 or younger as well as the teenagers of the upcoming ten years who were defined as different from Generation X. Since then, the company has sometimes used 1981 as the starting birth year. According to Horovitz, in 2012, Ad Age "threw in the towel by conceding that Millennials is a better name than Gen Y", and by 2014, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age said to NPR "the Generation Y label was a placeholder until we found out more about them".
