A yuppie is a young person with a good professional job — a lawyer, a banker, someone in finance or advertising — who lives in the city and seems to care mostly about earning money and buying expensive things. Nice suit, nice watch, nice apartment, always busy, always talking about work.

The word is an insult, or at least a criticism. It is not a neutral job description. When you call someone a yuppie you are saying they are shallow, that money and status matter more to them than people do. Nobody says "I am a yuppie" seriously; they might say it as a joke about themselves.

It has a date stamp on it. The word came out of America in the early 1980s and is tied tightly to that decade — the boom years, the sharp shoulder pads, the huge mobile phones, films about greedy Wall Street traders. Because of that, using it today makes you sound a little bit old, or makes it clear you are talking about the eighties. Younger speakers now reach for other words for the same complaint: hipster (different flavour — trendy rather than rich), or tech bro, or simply "rich kids." So yuppie is best understood as a word you will meet when reading about that period, and one that still works today if you want the specific 1980s flavour of money-first ambition.

The adjective and the noun for the way of life are yuppie too: yuppie bars, yuppie neighbourhoods, and there was even a word yuppiedom for the whole world of them.