Etimology   

Lexicographer Jesse Sheildower, the principal American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, argues that the terms hipster and hippie derive from the word hip, whose origins are unknown. The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1940, in his stage name”Harry the  Hipster”.Hipster was often used in the 1940s and 1950s to describe jazz performers. The word hippie was in a radio show on November 13, 1945, in which Stan Kenton called Harry Gibson,”hippie”. However, kenton’s use of the word was playing “Harry the Hipster”. Reminiscing about late 1940s Harlem in his 1964 autobiography, Malcom X referred to the word hippy as a term that African American used to describe a specific type of white man who “acted more Negro than Negroes”. 

Althought the word hippie made isolatated  appearances during the early 1960s, the first clearly contemporary use of the term appeared in print on September 5, 1965, in the article, “A New Heaven for Beatniks”, by San Fransisco journalist Michael Fallon. In that article, Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn cofeehouse, using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight-Ashbury district. New York Times editor and usage writer Theodore M.Bernstein said the paper changed the spelling from hippy to hippie to avoid the ambiguous description of clothing as hippy fashions.

 

Le mot hippie proviendrait d’un mot africain (hip, que certains pensent être un terme wolof, hipi signifiant « ouvrir ses yeux »), repris dans le mot hipster désignant les amateurs de bebop dans les années 1940. Une autre origine du terme parfois donnée est une dérivation de l’acronyme H.I.P., désignant un quartier de San Francisco, le Haight-Ashbury Independant Property, occupé par les hippies. L’acronyme serait également un jeu de mot avec hype signifiant « décontracté, branché, dans le coup ». Comme le hipster, le hippie devait être « cool ». Les hippies n’utilisaient pas ce nom pour se désigner eux-mêmes, ils disaient généralement freaks ou heads (les monstres ou les têtes).