Dictionary.com has chosen the term “6-7” as the word of the year 2025. And they have done so by admitting that no one, not even them, is clear what it means.
In a context of constant cultural ambiguity and limitless linguistic creativity, the expression has burst into schoolyards, TikTok feeds and family memes as a kind of private nod to Generation Alpha.
Pronounced six-seven – never sixty-seven -, the term began to circulate after the release of the song “Doot Doot (6 7)” by rapper Skrilla. The song obsessively repeats the “six-seven” formula without context, definition or obvious function beyond the phonetic. But that hasn’t stopped the term from spreading like a generational password.
The term has meandered through social media and the school hallways of the Alpha Gen
From cryptic language to lexicographic consecration
Dictionary.com defines it as “a viral, ambiguous and largely meaningless term that has meandered through social media and the school hallways of Gen Alpha.” Even so, some popular interpretations relate it to a gesture of indecision or ambivalence that is accompanied by a movement of the hands with the palms facing up, rising and falling alternately and that would mean something similar to “neither good nor bad”, “more or less” or simply “what do I know”.
Search traffic around “6-7” skyrocketed in June and has grown six-fold since then, surpassing other contenders for this year’s lexical throne: from kiss cam and tariffuntil tradwife and the dynamite (TNT) emoji, popularized as a symbol of the relationship between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.
The choice of “6-7” as the word of the year does not reward its meaning so much as its resistance to it. Instead of representing a concept, it embodies the attitude of a digital native generation that expresses itself in ephemeral codes, often ironic and always in transformation. Thus, the semantic void of “6-7” functions as a mirror of a youth that prefers community to consensus and “what means” to “what matters.”
For Dictionary.com, this choice is part of a broader strategy: to stay relevant not as normative custodians of language, but as cartographers of language in motion. In their statement, they acknowledge that “The appeal of 6-7 is precisely its impossibility of defining it”and that these types of terms demonstrate that language not only describes the world, but is used to play it.
