Dictionary.com recently announced that their 2025 Word of the Year is the infamous “67.”
I’m serious.
The slang term is still relatively new, having risen in popularity among school-aged children and the chronically online this past summer. It’s read out as “six-seven” and has no apparent meaning.
What I’m left wondering is why would they pick this? I personally do not see the appeal. Very few people know the word, it has no semantic value or meaning and it is arguably not a word.
Daniel Currie Hall, a professor of linguistics at Saint Mary’s University (SMU), specializes in phonology, the branch of linguistics dealing with sound patterns in language. He is similarly perplexed by this phenomenon of 67, citing its lack of wordlike qualities.
“I don’t actually know what it means,” Hall admitted. “I’m not convinced most other people know what it means in some sense, too.”
Hall does, however, see the social value of the word. He asserts that it has become a sort of game, a way for young people to signal to others that they are one of the “in crowd” who know the current slang.
“I think it’s a sensible choice,” said Hall. “It is very much of this year.”
Marisa Brook, a sociolinguist and assistant professor at SMU, points out that this type of humour is not new. Teens and young adults have always reshaped the language and created their own slang, much to the moral panic of their older counterparts. She also notes that every large societal change has backlash, no matter what it is.
According to Brook, adults worry that kids are lowering the quality of language and making it less logical.
“That’s a very compelling illusion,” Brook said, “but there isn’t any scientific evidence for it.”
So what is this type of humour?
The term 67 is a classic example of the genre of humour lovingly dubbed “brain rot.”
Kids and teens today use the term brain rot to refer to the mental numbness that can come after time spent mindlessly scrolling through the low-quality memes on social media, or “doomscrolling.” It’s so prevalent to our current zeitgeist that “brain rot” was chosen to be Oxford’s word of the year in 2024.
Brain rot as a concept, however, has been around for much longer than this. Its first recorded use was in 1854, in H.D. Thoreau’s Walden. Back then, it described the idea that shallow thinking could rot the mind over time.
It’s hard to say how far off he really was.
Luke Hathaway, a professor of English and creative writing at SMU, is thrilled to hear of language evolving in this way. Though he does not partake in the social media spaces that this type of humour frequents, he learns it secondhand through his two kids, aged 11 and 13.
“At Halloween, one of my kids’ friends wanted to carve 67 onto a pumpkin,” said Hathaway. “I was like, what does that mean? Is it offensive?”
Hathaway agreed with his colleagues that brain rot, and 67 specifically, are about connection and signaling that you are in the know. He noted that young people may find it funny that they have words in their vocabulary that their elders do not understand, giving them a sense of uniqueness and identity within their generation.
“I think it’s very cool for my kids to feel part of language creation, of emergent language,” he said. “That’s an experience that I would wish for my children to have.”
Despite the role 67 is playing in evolving language, I still do not get the hype around this word. I don’t expect I ever will. But this is bigger than me; it turns out this silly little catchphrase is surprisingly complex.
