Word.ws English Dictionary

Generation Alpha

Generation Alpha proper noun: the generation following Generation Z, born between the early to mid-2010s and the mid to late-2020s.

Proper noun

Generation Alpha

  1. The generation following Generation Z, born between the early to mid-2010s and the mid to late-2020s.
    • Generation Alpha members will be the most diverse of all the generations. In 2011, Generation Alpha reached a demographic milestone: there were more Generation Alpha babies born to minority families than white families in the United States […]2016, Jeanne Meister, Kevin J. Mulcahy, The Future Workplace Experience, McGraw Hill Professional, →ISBN, page 160
    Synonyms:
    Gen Alpha

Noun

Generation Alpha (plural Generation Alphas)

  1. A member of Generation Alpha.
    • According to one Coventry student, Denny Julian Deemin, Generation Zs (born between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s) will still want their own cars but Generation Alphas (born since 2005) will want a simpler lifestyle without the bother of ownership.2019, Jon Bentley, Autopia: The Future of Cars, Atlantic Books, →ISBN
    • Though the increased access to information afforded by technology is causing many Generation Alphas to experience up-ageing, it’s important to remember that they are still children.2021, Mark McCrindle, Ashley Fell, Sam Buckerfield, Generation Alpha: Understanding Our Children and Helping Them Thrive, Hachette Australia, →ISBN
    Synonyms:
    Alpha, Gen Alpha

Synonyms of Generation Alpha

Forms of Generation Alpha

pluralGeneration Alphas

Origin of Generation Alpha

Originated from a survey conducted in 2008 by the Australian consulting agency McCrindle Research, according to founder Mark McCrindle, who is generally credited with the term. McCrindle describes how his team arrived at the name in an interview in 2015: When I was researching my book The ABC of XYZ: Understanding the Global Generations (published in 2009) it became apparent that a new generation was about to commence and there was no name for them. So I conducted a survey (we're researchers after all) to find out what people think the generation after Z should be called and while many names emerged, and Generation A was the most mentioned, Generation Alpha got some mentions too and so I settled on that for the title of the chapter Beyond Z: Meet Generation Alpha. It just made sense as it is in keeping with scientific nomenclature of using the Greek alphabet in lieu of the Latin and it didn't make sense to go back to A, after all they are the first generation wholly born in the 21st Century and so they are the start of something new not a return to the old. McCrindle Research also took inspiration from the naming of hurricanes, specifically the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season in...

Questions about Generation Alpha

What does Generation Alpha mean?
Generation Alpha means the generation following Generation Z, born between the early to mid-2010s and the mid to late-2020s.
What part of speech is Generation Alpha?
Generation Alpha can be a proper noun or a noun.

Words near Generation Alpha in the dictionary

  1. generating
  2. generating function
  3. generating functions
  4. generation
  5. Generation A
  6. Generation Alpha
  7. Generation Alphas
  8. Generation Beta
  9. Generation Betas
  10. generation effect
  11. generation effects

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Generation Alpha (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Generation Alpha.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/generation_alpha. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.