The time has come for the word “retire” to retire.

“Retirement” no longer describes the lifestyle most people now leaving career jobs are choosing, say those who ponder the dilemma.

Four in ten members of AARP, the nation’s largest organization of people 50 and older, continue to work, says Harry “Rick” Moody, director of AARP’s Office of Academic Affairs. That statistic became a factor as the 38-million-member organization officially changed its name from American Association of Retired Persons to the acronym itself, making the r-word less prominent. When AARP first began, retirement referred to a more leisurely time of life than prevails today, Moody says. “The time is not what it used to be. It’s very different from the old view of retirement―the golf course and the rocking chair.”

A Merrill Lynch retirement study this year indicates the work-longer trend will grow even more as 78 million baby boomers (now ages 43 to 61) climb the age ladder. Seventy-six percent of boomers plan to continue working in their “retirement” years, the study found. More than half have taken steps to launch a new career or take on a new type of work. Some say they intend to start their own businesses. Some hope to do something new with skills they’ve polished over decades in the workplace. Some want to work for the health insurance. And many people still in the workforce are counting less on traditional sources of support in retirement such as defined benefit plans, Social Security and Medicare.

Old labels don’t work in a changing world, Moody says, and stereotypical images of what older people do and how they look must change, too. Just as no new term for “senior citizen” (not a great favorite, either) has caught on yet, no one has yet come up with the perfect word to replace “retirement.”

Some people have tried. These are among the contenders (cast your vote in our poll):

Refirement: Perhaps the first suggested word to replace “retirement,” this one is the brainchild of Jim Gambone, a Minnesota educator, writer, intergenerational expert and motivational workshop leader, who introduced it in his 2000 book, Refirement: A Boomer’s Guide to Life After 50. [1]

Rewire: Usually posed as “rewiring not retiring,” the phrase has appeared in the mass media.

Reboot: This one flows naturally from our technological age.

Retread: Ditto the above for this term, with a few more miles on it.

Caesura: Pronounced si-ZHOO-ra, this word of Latin derivation is defined as a break or pause in a line of verse or a melody.

Note that “caesura” doesn’t begin with “re,” a big reason why career educator and author Mary Louise Floyd chose it to replace “retirement” in her new book, Retired With Husband: Superwoman’s New Challenge, [2] published this year. The “re” in retirement and other words on the above list, she points out, implies repetition of what was done in the past. “Retirement is a derivative of ‘to retire,’” Floyd says, “which means to withdraw from action, to retreat, to fall back, recede, withdraw from use or service, put out and end.” For too many people, “it implies the end of productivity and involvement, like being put out to pasture,” she said in an interview from her home in Atlanta.

She considers “caesura” a fit for people at age 60 entering what she sees as a “second adulthood,” punctuated with the caesura as they transition from first adulthood. “We are like the line of poetry at its best point—posed at the caesura of life and ready to build on what we’ve done and where we’ve been,” she says.

AARP’s Moody says he thinks the “re” words proposed to replace “retirement” have failed to catch on. “I don’t see them in the New York Times,” he says. What about “caesura”? “I like that,” he says, especially its meaning of “a moment for reassessment, rethinking and repositioning,” rather than a final or permanent decision. “It almost has an analogy with the military,” he says. “Retirement for them is not the same as a surrender.” On the downside, he adds, “It’s hard to pronounce. And it’s Latin and a hard sell.”

Even Floyd, the word’s chief proponent, admits it doesn’t flow well as “caesura-ing.”

America, it seems, is still searching for a new word to reflect retirement's new meaning.

We want to know: Do you have a new name for retirement? Email us. [2]