Dictionary.com has announced their choice for the 2025 Word of the Year and it has a lot of people scratching their heads. The site has selected “67” - pronounced “six seven,” not sixty seven - and if you have no idea what that is, you’re probably not a middle schooler, or the parent or teacher of one.
67 is a slang term that’s become incredibly popular with Gen Alpha. Kids usually say it while making “its signature hand gesture where both palms face up and move alternately up and down,” but what does it mean? That’s a good question, because not only is 6-7 not really a word, it doesn’t have a concrete meaning, which is kind of the whole point. Some think it means “so-so” or “maybe this, maybe that,” but according to Dictionary.com, “It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical. In other words, it has all the hallmarks of brainrot.”
"This is really the first word of the year that we've had in a really long time that's actually more of an interjection," explains Steve Johnson, director of lexicography for the Dictionary Media Group at IXL Learning. "It's something that people are just shouting and saying, and that in itself is pretty novel and pretty spectacular." He says their team chose 67 because “it just kept growing larger and larger, snowballing into kind of like a cultural phenomenon.”
- The shortlist of other words Dictionary.com considered for the 2025 Word of the Year includes “argentic,” “aura farming,” “Gen Z stare,” “overtourism,” “tariff,” “tradwife” and even the dynamite emoji.⠀
Source: CBS News
Scott's Thoughts:
- Emojis and numbers as the word of the year? Just burn the dictionary now!
- This shows just how stupid the world is becoming.
- My frustration with this shows how old I really am.