I have a sixth grader and a second grader. Over the past year or so, I’ve been subjected to a host of social media trends and phrases, like “brain rot,” “Skibidi toilet,” and, most recently, “6-7.” (To properly participate, you need to move your palms in an up-and-down “so-so” motion and chant, ”six, seeev-ven” in a singsong voice.) Every year, websites like Cambridge Dictionary, Dictionary.com, Oxford Dictionary and Merriam-Webster announce their “word of the year.” Past words have included “rizz” (Oxford Dictionary, 2023), “demure” (Dictionary.com, 2024) and “brain rot” (Oxford Dictionary, 2024). This year, the big winner of Dictionary.com’s Word of The Year was “six, seeev-ven” or just “67” officially. What a time to be alive.
Sorry, parents and teachers of middle schoolers: your days of hearing “67” shouted randomly are far from over. Dictionary.com on Wednesday announced it has chosen “67” — pronounced “six seven,” not sixty-seven — as its 2025 Word of the Year.
67 is an ambiguous slang term made popular by Gen Alpha on social media and in schools and friend groups across the country. Its pervasiveness is what stuck out to the team selecting the word of the year, Steve Johnson, director of lexicography for the Dictionary Media Group at IXL Learning, told CBS News.
“Something that you would have thought would have gone away, it just kept on growing larger and larger, snowballing into kind of like a cultural phenomenon,” Johnson said.
Johnson knew they had “something really interesting” when he got a message from his friend, a middle school teacher, early one morning saying, “Do not make six seven word of the year.”
“I was just like, ‘Oh, teachers have found this,’” he said.
Reactions to the term, and its selection as word of the year, are sure to be divided by generation.
“This is really a new generation flexing their linguistic muscles and making a pretty phenomenal impact on the English language,” Johnson said. “That’s something to be celebrated and cheered.”
But for anyone older, “especially ones that have to deal with the shouting of ‘six seven’ out of nowhere on a day-to-day basis, I think there’s going to be a mixture of like groans and a lot of like, ‘Well, this tracks,’” he said.
What does 67 mean?
67 is different from previous words of the year because is doesn’t have a concrete meaning.
“This is really the first word of the year that we’ve had in a really long time that’s actually more of an interjection,” Johnson said. “It’s something that people are just shouting and saying, and that in itself is pretty novel and pretty spectacular.”
Some say it means “so-so” or “maybe this, maybe that,” since it is sometimes said with both palms facing up and moving alternately up and down, but it remains largely nonsensical, the Dictionary.com definition says.
“Because of its murky and shifting usage, it’s an example of brainrot slang and is intended to be nonsensical and playfully absurd,” the dictionary says.
It’s also a group identity marker or symbol of belonging, Johnson said.
“It’s something that’s used to show, ‘I’m part of this generation. This is who I am.’ It’s kind of like an in-group joke,” he said.
I take umbrage with this only because “6-7” is NOT a word! It’s a phrase. Actually, it’s technically a harmless chant that makes kids of all ages, from five to 18+, happy to say. The wildest part is its origin story, and even that is pretty tame. Everyone I’ve asked knows something about it, but no one has the full story. This video is a pretty good explainer.
When I shared this news with Mr. Rosie and asked his opinion on how to explain 6-7, he joked, ”Write an entire paragraph with just the numbers ‘6-7’ repeated over again in order to truly capture how annoying it is.” I’ll spare you all that visual, but he is right. It’s very annoying, but it’s also harmless, and we’re in such a delicate social media environment that I’ll take my kids being pushed to say “6-7” over any of the other crap they could be being fed right now.
Speaking to Newsweek about the 6-7 meme Halloween costume, Douglas Boneparth said “Once the parents take it the kids think it’s uncool.” https://t.co/yUbhkEMEHf
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) October 27, 2025
Photos are credit Getty and screenshots from YouTube/MrToucan Explains Memes