xennial
/ˈzɛniəl/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
3
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
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.
Informal
noun
Alternative letter-case form of xennial.
Example Sentences
- "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 piercings, and so many more reasons."
- "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 Twitter."
- "But there's this new group, you may know them — that microgeneration sandwiched between — who feel like they don't really belong to either group […] Love it or hate it, there's a newish name for these lost souls: the "xennials" (pronounced ZEE-knee-als)."
- "I’m a reluctant millennial myself (or possibly — God forbid — an xennial), stuck in the pretty common category of not identifying with my so-called generation."
Etymology
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈzɛniəl/
- British English: /ˈzɛnɪəl/