Other forms: generations
A generation is everybody born around the same time. You, your parents and your grandparents are three of them.
Roughly it is thirty years, and it is used both for a family and for a whole society, which is why we have the postwar generation and named ones like the baby boomers. The word also means the producing of something, so power generation is making electricity, and it names a stage in a product line, as in a third-generation phone. The generation gap describes the failure of two of them to understand each other.
1noungenerationAll the people born and living at about the same time.
“The house has been in the family for four generations.”
2nounproductionThe production of something, especially power.
“The plant handles most of the region's power generation.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
A generation is a begetting. Latin generō meant to beget, so the word named the act first and the people it produced only afterwards.
Middle English
generacioun
English, today
generation
Built from
From Middle English generacioun. Middle English generacioun, from Old French generacion, and its etymon Latin generātiō, from generō (“to beget, generate”). by surface analysis, generate + -ion.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA