Word.ws English Dictionary

xennial

UK/ˈzɛnɪəl/US/ˈzɛniəl/

xennial noun: a person born late in Generation X or early in Generation Y, that is, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s; a member of the Oregon Trail Generation.

Noun (1)

xennial (plural xennials)

  1. (informal) A person born late in Generation X or early in Generation Y, that is, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s; a member of the Oregon Trail Generation.
    • I was born in 1980. According to some sources, this makes me a Gen Xer. According to others, I’m a Millennial. That makes me what then, a Xennial? I take online quizzes, like Pew Research Center’s “How Millennial Are You?”, and land dead between Gen X and Millennial due to my personal habits, body...2014 September 25, Sarah Stankorb, “Glad to be a Xennial”, in GOOD
    • Xennial is a term that I first used in a 2014 story for GOOD magazine, following on the heels of writers like Doree Shafrir, who in 2011 called this cusp generation’s pop-cultural misfit status Generation Catalano, after crowdsourcing the My So-Called Life–inspired term from Danielle Nussbaum on...2017 July 6, Sarah Stankorb, “I Made Up Xennial 3 Years Ago, So Why Is a Professor in Australia Getting All the Credit?”, in Vogue
    Synonyms:
    elder millennial, geriatric millennial, millennial cusper

Noun (2) capitalized: Xennial

Xennial (plural Xennials)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of xennial.

Synonyms of xennial

Forms of xennial

pluralxennials
alternative formXennial
pluralXennials

Origin of xennial

Blend of (Generation) X + millennial.

Questions about xennial

What does xennial mean?
Xennial means a person born late in Generation X or early in Generation Y, that is, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s; a member of the Oregon Trail Generation.
What part of speech is xennial?
Xennial is a noun.
How do you pronounce xennial?
Xennial is pronounced /ˈzɛnɪəl/ (UK).
What is the plural of xennial?
The plural of xennial is xennials.

Words near xennial in the dictionary

  1. Xenites
  2. xenium
  3. Xenix
  4. xenization
  5. xenna-
  6. xennial
  7. xennials
  8. xenno-
  9. xeno-
  10. xeno-free
  11. xenoamicin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: xennial (page history and authors); Xennial (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: “xennial.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/xennial. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.