"67" is here to stay, and Dictionary.com might put the final nail in the coffin.
On Wednesday, October 29, Dictionary.com announced that it has chosen "67", pronounced "six seven", as its 2025 Word of the Year.
The slang term, which does not have any specific meaning, was made popular by Gen Alpha on social media and in schools and has taken middle schoolers by storm.
Moreover, the "brainrot term" has been popularised to the point that teachers feared saying the number in front of a class in fear that they would repeat it nonstop.
Steve Johnson, the director of lexicography for the Dictionary Media Group at IXL Learning, said that its pervasiveness is what earned it the title.
"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.
Sharing a telling incident, the director noted that he 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."
The origin of 67
The term originated from a song by rapper Skrilla, Doot Doot, in which the rapper frequently recites the lyric, "Six-seven."
In late 2024, the track went viral on TikTok as a sound, with thousands of users adding it to their uploads, leading to the song being officially released as a single in February 2025.
The song was then used on video clips of NBA players, including LaMelo Ball, who's 6 feet 7 inches.
It became a meme and continued to spread among young audiences and was also mentioned in a South Park episode.
