Hippie was a movement of young people in the United States that began in the 1960s and rejects the values and norms of standard American culture. It started on college campuses in the United States and quickly moved to other nations including Canada and the United Kingdom. The term "hip" was used in the 1950s to describe Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who were widely thought to be the originators of hippies. Unlike their activist counterparts known as "Yippie" (Youth International Party), hippies were frequently not immediately engaged in politics, even though the movement developed in part in opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War (1955–75).

Hippies were mostly white, middle-class teenagers and young adults who belonged to the baby-boom generation, the generation born in the decades after World War II. They felt isolated from middle-class society, which they see as being dominated by materialism and repression. As a result, hippies established their own distinct lifestyles and coined their own terminology and slang, establishing a sense of uniqueness.

Summer of Love was one of the biggest phenomena that were held in 1967 where thousands of young people gathered at San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district to join in the hippie adventure. According to Peter Coyote and Art Gerrans, the kids from all over the country flocked the place making the city infrastructure and resources strained, making the supposed to be peaceful and loving counterculture experience turn bad from people simply coming for drugs. This was the time when the hippie era and culture were starting to fade fast.

Although the early movement proved to raise peace and love in society with the culture they presented and the mindset they spread, the chaos caused by an unsanitary, nonpeaceful condition that spreads in the later years of the 1960s, became the downfall of the baby boomer generations along with the hippie movement. However, through this era, there are some cultures, fashions, and, in the linguistic factor, words, and phrases, that are so ingrained in American English and cultures, it is used continuously to this day, such as the use of the word "cool" to say something is good, and even that already exist in language a decade early. The slang superlatives during this era became worn through overexposure and almost none of the hippies' positive terms survive the era (Gross, 2017).