Since 1969, no number has caused so much disruption. “6 7”, pronounced “six-seveeen” (six seven, in English), is echoing through school hallways around the world, becoming the “nonsense” expression of the moment for the Alpha generation. Children shout it in classrooms when a teacher turns to page 67, when there are 6 to 7 minutes left before break, or for no reason at all. The number has become so ubiquitous that Dictionary.com named it the 2025 word of the year.
“It’s like a plague, a virus that took over the minds of these children” said Gabe Dannenbring, a seventh-grade science teacher in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “You can’t say any variation of the numbers 6 or 7 without at least 15 kids yelling, ‘6 7!'”
It’s a dull (or contextless) joke. but using it can make a student feel part of a cooler group of their peers.
“For them, it becomes a language game that, it seems, only people in their group know how to play,” said Gail Fairhurst, a professor at the University of Cincinnati who teaches leadership communication (and the language of leadership).
The term “6 7” is probably destined for the slang graveyard soon now that adults talk about it so much. But there is something almost profound in its infinite interpretations, in its refusal to be defined.
“I think that’s part of what bothers people and at the same time part of what they like,” said Taylor Jones, a linguist and social scientist.
An attempt to explain “6 7” (but don’t worry, no one knows what it means)
There may not be a coherent explanation for “6 7,” but here goes anyway: The number appears in the chorus of “Doot Doot (6 7),” a viral song by Philadelphia rapper Skrilla. In Skrilla’s case, according to Jones, “6 7” is likely a reference to the police code 10-67, often used to report a death in the United States.
In December 2024, around the same time that “Doot Doot” began to become popular, the high school basketball phenomenon Taylen Kinney seemed to create a gesture to go with the expression. In a video shared by the Overtime Elite league, a teammate asks Kinney to rate a Starbucks drink out of 10.
“Like a 6… 6… 6-7,” he says, adding an indecisive gesture, as if he’s weighing two options in the palms of his hands.
Shortly thereafter, Kinney began incorporating the song and gesture into her videos on TikTok, where she has more than 1 million followers.
The song began appearing in sports highlight videos, including those of Charlotte Hornets guard LaMelo Ball. (He is 6 feet 7 inches tall, which is 2.01 meters).
In March last year, a face for the number “6 7” emerged, when a video captured an excited young man at an amateur basketball game shouting “6 7” with the characteristic gesture. He became the personification of that annoying classmate who won’t stop spouting nonsensical sentences. Somehow, the Internet decided that this stereotype’s name would be Mason — and thus, Mason 67 became yet another inside joke.
So if a child uses any of the above explanations when you ask what the hell “6 7” means, they’re probably right. But most kids don’t even know where that number came from, Dannenbring said. “Nobody knows what that means,” he said. “And that’s the funny part of it.”
Its lack of meaning is due in part to what Jones calls “semantic emptying”, where a sentence is dissociated from its original context and starts to mean something completely different (or, in this case, nothing).
Kids shout “6 7” to belong to a group (and that’s great)
Of course, it’s nonsense, but the number “6 7” fulfills a crucial social function. It’s a code, a phrase that indicates someone belongs to a select group, Jones said. Anyone who doesn’t use or understand the code is left out. And which child doesn’t want to belong to a group?
“Language is a way for people to form communities,” Fairhurst said. “Even if it’s a meaningless term, if people seem to know what it means, it can be a unifying force. And if someone doesn’t understand the term, it can also exclude people from that community.”
The term “6 7” is also surviving longer than other nonsense words on the Internet probably because “adults get really annoyed by it,” Jones said.
“The fact that you can get a big reaction from someone for something that’s completely nonsensical can give it more longevity than it would have otherwise,” Jones said.
In the United States, fed ups are banning the song in their classrooms or making TikTok videos about how many times they’ve heard it in a single school day. Yelling “6 7” after music is banned becomes a “way of demonstrating resistance,” Fairhurst said.
Now teachers are defending themselves by using “6 7” themselves. An elementary school choir teacher in Michigan managed to avoid shouting “6 7” by incorporating it into a warm-up song.
When instructing his students to open their textbooks to page 67, Dannenbring suddenly adopts the tone of voice of his enthusiastic seventh graders, who immediately protest the use of an expression that does not belong to them. (At 27, Dannenbring is an older member of Gen Z. But a young teacher is still a teacher and therefore too old to play.)
“If you don’t play along, yes, it’s extremely disruptive,” Dannenbring said. “If you recognize the situation, it resolves itself in about 15 seconds.” And if that doesn’t end the conversation, he said he uses the phrase incorrectly on purpose: “‘That’s so ‘6 7’ of you guys.'”
“The easiest way to stop this is for teachers to say it’s cool,” Jones said.
Maybe “6 7” isn’t exactly a sign of “brain rot”
Don’t worry, parents. Incessantly shouting “6 7” is not enough to prove that your children are suffering from (or rotten brain). Concerns about declining literacy and diminishing critical thinking skills are legitimate, but they are being “projected onto normal youth behaviors,” Jones said.
“We are rewriting our own history,” he said. “This is not a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination.”
Each generation invents its own slang, and language evolves in ways most of us will never consciously notice, Jones explained. Children will always invent new expressions, and adults will be perplexed.
Nonsense expressions like this are not inherently harmful, and the expression “6 7” certainly won’t cause the demise of the language, Fairhurst said. But its popularity may be a benign symptom of our “post-truth” society, she said, where the meaning and specificity of communication matter less than people’s interpretation of it.
“It seems to be kind of a relative of that kind of phenomenon, where we use language simply for the sake of it, and not because we see anything particularly meaningful or real in it,” she said.
Perhaps “6 7″‘s days are numbered — it has been around for more than a year, which is equivalent to a century in TikTok time. Some of Dannenbring’s students are already rolling their eyes when they hear their classmates shouting that number. Elementary school teacher and comedian Philip Lindsay said he already hears possible substitutes in his classroom — “41,” for example, another equally nonsensical number that makes kids laugh inexplicably.
“The 41 was started to try to dethrone the ‘6 7,'” Lindsay said. “The ‘6 7’ just happened. The 41 was boosted.”
In Dannenbring’s view, slang can be much worse than “6 7.” Past trends have inspired students to stick pencils in their school-issued laptops to set them on fire or rip sinks out of school bathroom walls. “We’ve heard other expressions before,” he said. “But this one’s a lot less annoying.”
