These words refer to people, usually young and sometimes artistic or quasi-artistic in bent, who as a group rebel against middle-class standards and choose to live a spontaneous, impoverished life characterized by eccentric dress, amoral behaviour, and an anarchic, solipsistic, or leftist philosophy. Hippie refer to a member of the most clearly defined such group to emerge in the late 1960s. Hippies , most typically, were under thirty, were interested in psychedelic drugs, rock music, communal living and an apolitical oriental philosophy based universal love. Historically, bohemian can refer to a member of the earliest such group to gain notice, emerging in Paris around the turn of the century; a romanticized version of their life was the subject of Puccini’s opera La Bohème. Unlike hippies , bohemians were more often struggling young artists whose poverty was involuntary stemming from the neglect of their work by the public. The word was taken up and extended to any group of artists who congregated in certain sections of big cities: the bohemians who gathered in Greenwich Village during the Great Depression. While the word is thus more general, it can now sound dated except in historical usage.

In the 1950s, the American word hipster (earlier, hepster) referred to a member of a coterie that doted on avant-garde jazz and adopted a "cool" or uninvolved life-style as a protest against what they saw as a dehumanizing society. At first, a hipster might have been most typically a Negro musician, but the word widened out to include anyone who modelled his life on such jazz heroes as Charlie Parker. Inspired in part by the hipster , a literary movement arose in this period whose practitioners were called beatniks . Forerunner of the 1960s hippie , the beatnik dressed in jeans and T-shirt, wore his hair long, advocated unconventional or undisciplined literary forms, and valued jazz, motor-cycles, aimless travelling from city to city, and the drug experience. In their extreme alienation from society, beatniks were often pessimistic in outlook whereas the later hippie was often optimistic in that he saw himself as the opening wedge of a generational upsurge towards a more open and positive way of life. Also, the hippie was less often an artist, real or imagined.

Teenybopper was developed in the late 1960s to refer to young teenagers or eve 11- 12-year-olds who fanatically modelled themselves on their older hippie sisters in dress and devotion to pop music. Unlike their American counterparts, who are prepared to try out drugs or other experimentation, they are more often children whose main passion is to grow up before their time and break away from the real or imagined restrictions of home life.

Head can refer to any beatnik , hippie or other person who is addicted to some psychedelic drug as his main pleasure and interest: a close-knit group of heads who turned on together at least once a week. The word is sometimes a combining form used in connection with a specific psychedelic: pothead (marijuana), acidhead (LSD), A-head (amphetamines). Drop-out refers to a hippie or a head who has completely withdrawn from society into a world of personal consciousness defined for him and heightened by the use of psychedelics. When used by members of the in-group, drop-out is not pejorative since the act of withdrawing is considered necessary to full personal realization. A conflicting use confuses this sense, however, since the word can also refer to young people who do not continue in high school and thus are in danger of becoming unemployables living on the edge of society in the dehumanizing culture of poverty: a government programme to train drop-out and, if possible return them to school.