The common notion of “retirement” is of an abrupt cessation of work followed by years of leisure and travel. This entry discusses retirement as a normative ideal while also considering its historical trends, processes, and measurement difficulties. It also considers how patterns of retirement correspond to demographic and economic shifts, including the rise in women's employment, changes in employer/employee relations, and effects of the Great Recession on individuals, organizations, and governments. Retirement as a one-time, abrupt event is not as common as people may think. Rather, about half of workers taper their exit from the labor force through a reduction in work hours, a change of occupation, or reentry into the labor force after a short period of nonemployment. This suggests that for half of workers, retirement is more of a process than an event. Various ways that older workers exit the workforce are captured through terms such as bridge jobs, reversing retirement, phased…