yuppie [1980s] 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.