“6-7!” Everyone, from your little sibling to the British prime minister, has been juggling their hands in recognition of those irritating consecutive numbers. This brainrotted interjection has worked its way to the title of Dictionary.com word of the year, a fact which, though initially amusing, is a disgrace to words of the year and to language itself.
“6-7” first appeared in the drill rap song “Doot Doot (6 7)” by Skrilla, which is laden with Philadelphia-area criminal jargon and African American dialectal words. It is possible that “6-7” originates in the former, where it could be derived from a police code for a dead body. Regardless of its origins, the phrase was popularized by TikTok videos of basketball player LaMelo Ball, who is 6 feet and 7 inches tall, and gained traction on social media. The rest is history.
However, “6-7” is a poor choice for word of the year because it is neither a word nor particularly “of the year.” Though linguists’ opinions differ on what specifically constitutes a word, the consensus is unanimous that a word must communicate some sort of meaning. In its own definition, Dictionary.com calls the word “a principal carrier of meaning.”
This concerningly obvious characteristic is nonetheless absent from “6-7”: Dictionary.com helplessly admits that “it’s impossible to define. It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical.” Some sources will also report that “6-7” means “so-so,” but this idea is also tenuous at best. Few who regularly blurt out the phrase actually use it to convey that narrow meaning, not to mention that it has no relation to the phrase’s verifiable origin. Fox News’s baffling Shakespearean etymology is no better, either.
Aside from not actually being a word, “6-7” is a terrible way of representing the tumultuous time that has been 2025. This year has seen democratic backsliding, resistance to authoritarianism, humanitarian tragedies, and the effects of rapid AI development, yet Dictionary.com has shirked all of these headlines in favor of a phenomenon that is a meme and not much more.
While the dictionary justifies its choice by connecting “6-7” with brainrot and remarks that it “shows the speed at which a new word can rocket around the world as a rising generation enters the global conversation,” “6-7” is far from the only social media-driven option to choose from: Dictionary.com’s own shortlist, in fact, includes “broligarchy,” “clanker,” and “tradwife.” Promoting cohesion within members of a social group is a definitional aspect of slang, not a special trait of “6-7.”
Why, then, did Dictionary.com choose “6-7” to encapsulate a year as historic as ours? It would seem the reason is merely one of publicity. Following the announcement, such reputed news sources as Time, ABC, The Independent, and CBC reported on Dictionary.com’s choice, with many sources framing it as the word of the year rather than a subjective opinion.
This publicity lent a great deal of legitimacy not only to Dictionary.com but also to “6-7” itself; after all, recognizing “6-7” as the word of the year also, implicitly, recognized “6-7” as a word. Such an attitude is needlessly common in our present day molded by social media: for whatever reason, we all too readily give simple memes the legitimacy of being real words — concrete parts of language rather than ephemeral trends whose lifetime is dictated by recommendation algorithms.
Consider the “brainrot words” that were fodder for cheap jokes just last year: “skibidi,” “rizz,” and “Ohio,” to name a few. The first of those three, “skibidi,” had much in common with “6-7,” having no meaning and only surviving by being referred to rather than used in conversation. To call it a word gave it the same status of slang that was enjoyed by “rizz” and “sigma,” words which, though cringeworthy, at least had consistent meanings. To be clear, a meme or viral phenomenon can still have importance and impact without being designated a word, and we shouldn’t need to make inaccurate overstatements of their linguistic value to praise and condemn them.
Dictionaries are also complicit in this meme-to-slang-to-word pipeline. While language is ever-changing and the role of dictionaries is to record how words are actually used — an example of what linguists would call prescriptivism — the overwillingness of dictionaries to add new words results in an inaccurate picture of how permanent recently developed words are.
Merriam-Webster, the dictionary of choice of the Associated Press and of Tatler, has added many such words. “On fleek,” an expression popularized by defunct social media service Vine meaning “perfectly done,” was added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary in October 2021, well after its rapid decline following a peak in 2014-2015.
This unstable change in popularity is characteristic of an online trend, not a linguistic feature, which is likely why I — and likely you — have never read or heard the phrase in my conscious lifetime, let alone in 2025. We see a similar die-off already with “skibidi,” which was assigned a vague definition in Cambridge Dictionary this August. Aside from the fact that “skibidi” was never used in conversation to convey meaning, and instead only to refer to the actual word, it’s hard to imagine “skibidi” being used in any capacity two, five, or ten years into the future.
Needless to say, I am not a lexicographer or a linguist, and I cannot comment on the reasons for these words’ inclusion in dictionaries, but as a language enthusiast and a student who hears slang every day, I think it is important to distinguish trends from slang, and slang from legitimate linguistic evolution.
At the same time, most of us have little idea where the slang terms we use originate. Many slang terms popularized by social media, such as “opp,” “gyat,” and “ahh,” originated in Black dialects and were used long before their online fame; similarly, words such as “tea” and “slay” originated in the ballroom subculture, which involved LGBTQ+ people of color. Now, though, they are treated as components of “Gen Z” or “Gen Alpha” slang and removed from their original contexts.
In his book Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language, linguist Adam Aleksic writes, “Pieces of Black culture were being treated as entertainment to the point where they were no longer thought of as Black culture, before eventually being discarded. Meanwhile, the inescapably ‘social media’ or ‘Gen Z’ associations cast onto the words took them out of the hands of marginalized communities who had started those jokes as a form of power.” The news media further exacerbates this problem through the language used in their reporting and the pervasive “you’ll never guess what the kids are saying now!” tone of their explanations, and I believe that dictionaries also play a role in this process.
Once a word already perceived as slang is added to a dictionary, it is no longer a strong marker of group identity — in the case of slang, usually Gen Z or Gen Alpha identity — and it loses any popularity it may have had, rendering the phrase further unusable by its community of origin. We see a story that is all too similar with “6-7,” where a term originating in Philadelphia-area criminal terminology is taken progressively out of context through overuse and reporting, so that by the time it is crowned word of the year, it is a tired trend dead on arrival.