yuppie
/ˈjʌpi
/(also yuppy)
noun (plural yuppies) informal, derogatory
A fashionable young middle-class person with a well-paid job: stereotypical 1980s yuppies obsessed with material objects and financial success [as modifier]: a yuppie type from the bank...
- The yuppie crowds love the concept and organisers swear that these events are extremely popular.
- There were even people playing football in the yuppie village this evening.
- Harlem is a relatively harmless, rather dull patch of a great city still garnering a tiny cachet among the local yuppies because it used to have quite a spunky black community.
Derivatives
yuppiedom
- Unfortunately, I was unaware of the simple plant-selling business' transition to inner-city yuppiedom: namely, charging an offensive extra amount on otherwise sensibly priced organic growth.
- Tramps who once scorned communism began to cast a yearning eye toward Western-style yuppiedom.
Origin
1980s: elaboration of the acronym from young urban professional.
The 1980s saw the rise of the yuppie, the ‘young urban professional’ or, as people later interpreted the initials, ‘young upwardly mobile professional’ (or ‘person’). The Yuppie Handbook inaugurated their era in 1984, the year when the word is first recorded. It was possibly suggested by the yippies, a term for members of the Youth International Party, a group of politically active hippies formed in the USA in 1966.