Welcome to the world, Generation Beta. Would you like a new name?

Welcome to the world, “Generation Beta.” Newborn babies in 2025 are members of a brand new generation, but already, some are calling for a new name.

“Hmm can we workshop the name please?” asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a post on Bluesky. “They’re going to be bullied by the skibidi kids.”

Naming generations is one of the largest scale public branding jobs there is. Social scientists, writers, and public intellectuals can coin nicknames, but they don’t always last, and it takes culture-wide buy in for these terms to gain popular acceptance.

For someone like Ocasio-Cortez, who was born in 1989, renaming a generation is no big deal. The 35-year-old New York Democrat and her age cohort have at various times been nicknamed “Generation Y,” “Echo Boomers,” and ‘Generation 9/11” before the term “Millennials,” coined by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1991 book Generations, took off in 2013 and stuck. Other generations have had alternate nicknames too, like Generation X, which has been called the “MTV Generation,” and Generation Z, which has been called the “iGeneration” and “Homeland Generation.”

Why Generation Beta?

Named for the second letter of the Greek alphabet, the term Generation Beta was coined by McCrindle, an Australian social research, demographics and data analytics agency whose founder Mark McCrindle also came up with the name Generation Alpha for people born between 2010 and 2024. The agency is calling for standardized Greek alphabet naming constructions for future generations that would continue with Generation Gamma beginning in 2040, and Generation Delta in 2055.

“Other approaches to naming generations, using terms such as ‘millennials,’ often define a generation around a single event and have vague birth ranges, leading to subjective analysis,” McCrindle writes in a blog post. “A sociological approach to generational analysis, using set birth years and non-descriptive labels, allows for more objective analysis and individual identity creation.”

Such a clinical approach, though, doesn’t take into account the possibility that Greek letters take on alternative meanings, as “beta” being a pejorative term among today’s youth, or that future events become generation-defining turning points that marketers, academics, journalists, and others latch onto to define an age cohort. Today’s newborns may well be known as “Generation Beta” for life, but other nicknames will inevitably bubble up over the next two decades, and there’s always a chance that one of them might stick.