Pope Gregory XV and nepo baby Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, Domenichino, c. 1621
26 August 2024
Nepo baby is slang for a child of a famous person who achieves professional success based on who their parents are. The term is from nepo[tism] + baby, and nepotism is from the Latin nepos (nephew) + -ism (cf. Bob’s your uncle) The word nepotism begins to appear in English in 1669 with the publication of an English translation of the 1667 Il nepotismo di Roma, a book about the practice of popes elevating their nephews (often alleged to actually be their illegitimate sons) to the rank of cardinal. In his diary for 27 April 1669, Samuel Pepys makes reference to the work, which seems to have been something of a bestseller:
Up and to the office, where all the morning. At noon home to dinner, and then to the office again, where all the afternoon busy until late; and then home and got my wife to read to me again in The Nepotisme, which is very pleasant, and so to supper and to bed.
The slang nepo baby is much more recent, however, and, rather than to the Vatican, was originally applied in the context of the entertainment industry. The earliest use of this term that I can find is a 9 December 2020 tweet:
just realized jack quaid is a nepo baby omg
Jack Quaid, one the stars of the streaming TV series The Boys (2019– ), is the child of actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan.
There are undoubtedly earlier examples out there, but searching Twitter/X is difficult not only because X.com’s infrastructure is falling apart, but also because there are a number of extremely prolific posters who use nepo baby in their screen names, and when a user changes their screen name, all their older posts are updated with that name. So the search results are flooded with thousands of false hits that obscure the true hits. It does, however, seem that the term came into widespread use on Twitter around July 2021, with relatively few uses before that.
And nepo baby made it into Urbandictionary.com that month, on 28 July 2021:
nepo baby
a child of a famous actor/celebrity who got famous due to nepotism.
“Did you hear about Jamie? She’s such a nepo baby.”
The mainstream press picked up on the term a few months later, albeit in the web edition of London’s Evening Standard of 29 September 2021. By this time the term had moved beyond the entertainment industry, encompassing the children of politicians:
The billionaire Blair: how did the former PM’s son Euan win the backing of America’s richest family?—The Yale graduate’s apprenticeship startup Multiverse has just secured the backing of the Walmart owners in a deal that values his fortune at £345 million. Katie Strick charts the making of the nepo baby tipped to become a billionaire.
And it was appearing in print by 22 December 2022 when a pair of London papers ran articles about the phrase. This ran in the Evening Standard’s print edition:
Lily Rose Depp doesn’t want to be called a “nepo baby”
The fascination and frustration at “nepo babies”—celebrity progeny, basically—has been a characterising trend of 2022. From Brooklyn Beckham’s outrageous wedding to billionaire heiress Nicola Peltz, to Zoe Kravitz admitting she feels “insecure” about being the daughter of musician Lenny Kravitz and actor Lisa Bonet ahead of her Batman starring role, TikTokers are exhausted by the firm grasp nepotism has over the entertainment industry.
And the following ran in the Guardian on the same day:
Alyx, I keep seeing TikToks about “nepo babies”. What is a nepo baby and why do we hate them?
The answer to your first question is easy: nepo is short for “nepotism”. And a baby, in this instance, means the child of someone who’s already successful. You don’t have to be a baby to be a nepo baby. It is an all-ages phrase.
The Guardian article incorrectly credits a 20 February 2022 tweet about Maude Apatow, a star of the TV series Euphoria and child of director Judd Apatow and actor Leslie Mann, with kicking off the trend of using the phrase, but not only was the term, as we have seen above, already well established by then, that particular tweet doesn’t even use the term nepo baby; it uses nepotism baby.
Sources:
@bardverse. X.com, 9 December 2020.
@MeriemIsTired. X.com, 20 February 2022.
Gorman, Alyx and Calla Wahlquist. “Nepo Babies: What Are They and Why Is Gen Z Only Just Discovering Them?” Guardian, 22 December 2022.
“Lily Rose Depp Doesn’t Want to Be Called a ‘Nepo Baby.’” Evening Standard (London), 22 December 2022, 9/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2003, s.v. nepotism, n.
Pepys, Samuel. Diary entry for 27 April 1669. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol 9 of 10 (1971). Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds. Berkeley, California: U of California Press, 2000, 535.
Strick, Katie. “The Billionaire Blair” (headline). Evening Standard (London), 29 September 2021, web edition. NewsBank.
Urbandictionary.com, 28 July 2021, s.v. nepo baby.
Image credit: Domenichino, c. 1621. Wikimedia Commons, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Béziers, Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.