hippies

Cultural  

1. Members of a movement of cultural protest that began in the United States in the 1960s and affected Europe before fading in the 1970s. Hippies were bound together by rejection of many standard American customs and social and political views (see counterculture). The hippies often cultivated an unkempt image in their dress and grooming and were known for practices such as communal living, free love, and the use of marijuana and other drugs. Although hippies were usually opposed to involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, their movement was fundamentally a cultural rather than a political protest. (See Woodstock; compare beatniks.)

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Example Sentences

While home births were once the province of counterculture hippies, Los Angeles doula Rebecca Richter said she’d been hearing from women of all walks of life “who desire more than the system is giving them.”

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 3, 2026

In many ways, the pharma-focused psychedelics movement is just reinventing the wheel that West Coast hippies have been spinning since the 1960s, and many Indigenous communities for centuries before them.

From Slate • Jan. 30, 2026

Dubbing it “the Californian Ideology,” they argued that the “new faith” blended the “freewheeling spirit of the hippies with the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies.”

From Salon • Nov. 7, 2025

"Me, I wasn't a hippy back then, but I knew a lot of hippies," he says with his characteristic laugh.

From BBC • Aug. 9, 2025

So help me, I didn’t know how weird it all was until my parents decided they were too old to be hippies anymore, and we rejoined the real world.

From "Schooled" by Gordon Korman