Ever Wonder How Generations Get Their Names? One Man Is to Blame—but Not Everyone’s Happy About It.

Mark McCrindle is widely credited with giving generations their names.

He also coined Gen Alpha , which has been widely adopted to describe kids born from 2010 to 2024 .

The naming system designates each generation with successive Greek alphabet letters, timing each generation in 15-year increments.

This approach allows for a more scientific model that describes generations at a global scale.

David Gergen : For Mannheim and his peers, World War I was the crucial, generation-defining event.

Gergen says in the 1970s , marketers took over the generation game.

Baby boomers got their label early on because it described a measurable phenomenon of elevated birth rates.

By the late 1990s , stories about echo boomers focused on companies figuring out how to sell their products.

The term “millennial” was coined by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe in 1991 .

The word millennial stood for the time frame in which many members of the generation grew up or entered the workforce.