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

Around the same time, George Ohsawa’s book Zen Macrobiotics introduced to the West the concept of a macrobiotic diet, which hippies popularized.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 10, 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

His longtime prescriptions of fresh food, sunshine, regular exercise and meditation are now widely accepted building blocks of health, and are no longer the sole province of ditzy L.A. hippies.

From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 13, 2026

"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

There was a saying that the Evening Star hippies were the only farmers in the Miracle Valley rich enough to turn over their gardens and cut their fields by hand.

From "The Milagro Beanfield War" by John Nichols