Meanings
beat generation1
plural beat generations
- Alternative letter-case form of Beat Generation.
They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.
1957 September 5, Jack Kerouac, chapter 9, in On the Road, New York, N.Y.: Viking Press, →OCLC, part 1
Beat Generation2
alternative beat generation
- A group of countercultural American writers who came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their most important works are Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959).
Synonyms & antonyms
nouna United States youth subculture of the 1950s; rejected possessions or regular work or traditional dress; for communal living and psychedelic drugs and anarchism; favored modern forms of jazz (e.g., bebop)
Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.
Origin
Often attributed to Herbert Huncke, from beat (“exhausted”), with Jack Kerouac later claiming it derived from beatific instead.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
beat generation. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/beat%20generation
“beat generation.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/beat%20generation. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “beat generation,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/beat%20generation.
Source: beat generation on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.