hip [OE] Both the hip that is part of the body and the rose hip, although unrelated, are Old English and share forms with other Germanic languages. Hip in the sense ‘aware, well informed, sophisticated’ is something of a mystery. The variant hep is recorded just one year earlier (1903) than hip, so they seem to have been variants from the start, although hep is now generally out of favour. They started out as African-American slang and their origin is unknown, although theories range from the West African language Wolof to someone’s name. Hipster, someone who is hip, dates from the 1930s, and was revived in an ironic sense in the 1980s. Hippie dates from the 1940s for someone who is hip, but was transferred to someone supporting the countercultural movement of the 1960s.