According to lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, the terms hipster and hippie derive from the word hip and the synonym hep, whose origins are disputed.
[1] The words hip and hep first surfaced in slang around the beginning of the 20th century and spread quickly, making their first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1904.
In the late 1960s, African language scholar David Dalby popularized the idea that words used in American slang could be traced back to West Africa.
[1] During the jive era of the late 1930s and early 1940s, African-Americans began to use the term hip to mean "sophisticated, fashionable and fully up-to-date".
[7] In Greenwich Village, New York City by the end of the 1950s, young counterculture advocates were widely called hips because they were considered "in the know" or "cool", as opposed to being square.
[10] In a 1961 essay, Kenneth Rexroth of San Francisco used both the terms hipster and hippies to refer to young people participating in African American or Beatnik nightlife.
[11] In 1963, the Orlons, an African-American singing group from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania released the soul dance song "South Street", which included the lyrics "Where do all the hippies meet?
[17] The term "hippie" appears in a book review in The New York Times of April 21, 1964, entitled "Is The Pentagon Threatened by Civilians on Horseback?"
"[18] The term appeared numerous times in the Village Voice on September 10, 1964, in an article entitled "Baby Beatniks Spark Bar Boom on East Side".
"[20] Shortly afterwards, on December 6, 1964, in an article entitled "Jean Shepherd Leads His Flock On A Search For Truth", journalist Bernard Weinraub of The New York Times wrote about the Limelight coffeehouse, quoting Shepherd as using the term hippie while describing the beatnik fashions that had newly arrived in Greenwich Village from Queens, Staten Island, Newark, Jersey City, and Brooklyn.
[21] And the Zanesville Times Recorder, on January 1, 1965, ran a story questioning how society could tolerate a new underground New York newspaper started by Ed Sanders called The Marijuana Times — whose first issue (of only two, dated January 30) it directly quoted as saying: "The latest Pot statistics compiled through the services of the Hippie Dope Exchange, will be printed in each issue of the Marijuana Newsletter."
Howard R. Moody, of the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, was quoted in the June 6, 1965, New York Times as saying "Every hippy is somebody's square.