If you don’t have a teenager or don’t spend a lot of time online, you may not know the
phrase 6-7.
What does it mean? Well, no one is sure.
But that – plus the fact it’s a number – did not prevent it from being named the “Word of
the Year” by Dictionary.com.
Really? Yup.
What in the world of gaslighting (the 2021 honoree), pandemic (2020), misinformation
(2018) and bruh (somehow overlooked) is going on here?
Kristen Syrett, professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Arts
and Sciences at Rutgers, offered some insights. And as linguist who attends the
American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year vote every January —and a mom to a 16-
year-old son — we figured there is no better expert.
Here are her thoughts, provided by Rutgers.
Q: The word of the year is supposed to capture a pivotal moment in language and
culture, according to Dictionary.com. What do you think it says about this moment in
time that 6-7 is the word of the year?
A: The word of the year captures a kind of swell of linguistic excitement in pop culture
and seems to celebrate one person’s or population’s contribution to our collective
attention and mindset. We can think of something similar that happened when “not” or
“psych” became super popular post-sentence tags in the ’80s and early ’90s. Yes, they
contributed some meaning (what we might technically call propositional negation – “not
that!” or “I don’t mean that!”) but in saying it, you showed you were speaking the
language of your generation.
Q: Does 6-7 have any meaning, or is there meaning in having no definition?
A: “6-7” may have a meaning, and there may be a dispute about what that meaning is. I
think the reason it has caught on is that this phrase, in and of itself, doesn’t convey a
particular meaning. Rather than thinking of it contributing a meaning like an “open-
class” word does (a word like a noun, like “dog” or “umbrella” or a verb like “run” or
“think”), I like to think of it as more of a discourse marker that contributes meaning in
another, more social way.
The fact that it is accompanied by what we would call a “co-speech gesture” (the open, extended hands moving up and down) means that the utterance and the gesture
together can serve as a signal of being part of an in group.
In a way, I think asking about the definition defeats the purpose: “What does that even
mean?!” “Bruh. It just IS.”
Q: How do you think 6-7 can earn this designation if it’s not even a word?
A: The word of the year votes gradually started to allow entries and acknowledge
winners that we might not think of as “words” a while ago. Doing so started to push the
boundaries of what a “word” is and of what we think of as a meaningful chunk of sound
that captures a pivotal moment.
Consider “jump the couch” (inspired by Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah Winfrey’s coach
during an interview to express his love for Katie Holmes) or the Gen Z slang “let x
cook”. These are chunks of sound in the ether that convey not just a word-level
meaning, but a collective social meaning that unites certain people and captures where
we were, what influenced us, or what occupied our attention in a point in time.
Q: What do you know about the origins of 6-7?
A: I’ve heard the Skrilla song, seen the basketball videos, seen the video of the kid in
the bleachers, and so many other things that blew up since. It seems like it was a
convergence of these things, the simplicity of the phrase, and the silliness of getting so
excited by it that led to it taking off.
Q: Why do you think it became a trend, considering it doesn’t have any real meaning?
A: It’s so damn catchy! But that’s not enough. I think there’s something genuinely fun
and exciting about being able to easily recreate that sequence and slip it into
conversations. Numerals are ubiquitous – addresses, phone numbers, passwords, page
numbers, prices, scores. There are so many occasions to discover and plant this
sequence.
The Dictionary.com release states, “Perhaps the most defining feature of 67 is that it’s
impossible to define. It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical. In other words, it
has all the hallmarks of brainrot. It’s the logical endpoint of being perpetually online,
scrolling endlessly, consuming content fed to users by algorithms trained by other
algorithms.”
Q: What do you make of that and what it says about how scrolling has taken over the
youngest generation’s lives?
A: “Meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical” are the very qualities I LOVED about
Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and why “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is so quotable! I might even compare “6-7!” to “1, 2,…5!” Yes, obsession with phones and
scrolling through quick videos are hallmarks of this generation, and we can lament that,
but there’s something at the core we can all relate to.
Q: Do new words always come from the youngest generation, or what does it say about
where we are that this year’s word of the year is popular with the tween and teen and
even elementary school set?
A: No, they don’t, but we do know that the younger generations drive language change.
It makes sense to me that some of the most fun and catchy contenders for word of the
year are coming from this younger group, because they’re the ones creating trends on
TikTok.
