--- - |2 Abstract Increasingly, individuals identify with two or more racial or cultural, yet are sometimes externally misclassified, contributing to experiences of invisibility within U.S. society. Using computational techniques, we examined the transmission of cultural identity terms through time, providing some evidence for the changing representation of social identity. We examined the usage patterns of identity terms with the prefixes (mono‐, bi‐, multi‐), modifying the social identity terms: culture, ethnicity, and race (e.g., comparing monocultural, monoethnic, and monoracial). For bicultural and multicultural terms, those with ‐racial suffixes were the earliest used terms, while those with ‐cultural and ‐ethnic suffixes gained more popularity in recent years. We examined the evolution of the higher frequency social identity terms in lay sources (the NY Times, Reddit), and found that interracial and multicultural were the most popular over time, peaking recently. We examined the potential time lag in the sequence of identity terms among academic (PsycINFO, NIH, and NSF Databases), lay (the NY Times), and mixed sources (Google Books N‐Grams), demonstrating that newer terms (e.g., multicultural) are first used and gain prevalence in lay sources, then mixed sources, and eventually academic sources. The implications of these findings for research, public policy, and psychosocial experiences of individuals are discussed. - Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, EarlyView.