Millennial pause

The millennial pause is a pause in speaking that is present at the start of some recorded videos, especially on the short-form video app TikTok.

The term was coined in 2021 by the TikTok user @nisipisa and gained popularity after Kate Lindsay’s article for The Atlantic.

The practice of including such a pause is generally ascribed to millennials, a group often defined to include people born in the 1980s or 1990s. The term “Millennial Pause” means “Split-Second Pause at Beginning of Video to Ensure Camera is Recording.”

The millennial pause, as Lindsay defines it, is the split-second millennials wait before they start talking in a video to intuitively circumvent recording delay. One could say that the pause is a technical hangover from using older technology that did not start recording instantly. The ‘millennial pause’ is a phenomenon where millennials pause for a second before speaking when a video begins to reassure them that everything is in place.