Skrilla’s 6-7 Became Word of the Year by Meaning Nothing

Dictionary.com named 67 its 2025 Word of the Year on October 28, 2025, then called the term impossible to define. The numbers come from Philadelphia rapper Skrilla’s drill song “Doot Doot (6 7),” a track he leaked on Instagram in December 2024 and barely meant to put out.

Kids turned the hook into a palms-up chant. Adults asked what it meant. The answer that stuck is that it does not mean anything, which is why it moved.

The Instagram Leak That Should Have Died

Skrilla, born Jemille Edwards on June 3, 1999, grew up in Kensington, the North Philadelphia corridor he has spent years putting on tape. He has said he leaked “Doot Doot (6 7)” on Instagram in December 2024 with no plan to release it. The response, he later told Genius, “went crazy.”

Priority Records put the song out on February 7, 2025. It landed as a bonus cut on the deluxe edition of his 2024 album Zombie Love Kensington Paradise. The record is 2 minutes and 29 seconds. The beat drops on a line about a switch and a body, then the numbers:

“The way that switch brrrt, I know he dyin’ / 6-7, I just bipped right on the highway.”

He has said a crash on the way to the studio sat behind the highway image. He also called the song a throwaway. Billboard still logged it at No. 10 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 for the week of March 8, 2025, and at No. 45 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs for the week of March 22, 2025.

THE PATH FROM A LEAK TO A DICTIONARY

1. December 2024: Skrilla leaks the audio on Instagram as a loosie he does not plan to release.
2. December 1, 2024: TikToker Matvii Grinblat pairs the hook with LaMelo Ball, who stands 6 feet 7 inches; Songfacts later put that clip at 9.6 million views in two months.
3. February 7, 2025: Priority issues “Doot Doot (6 7)” and it is added to the deluxe of Zombie Love Kensington Paradise.
4. March 2025: A boy later nicknamed the 67 Kid, Maverick Trevillian, yells the numbers at a basketball game and the gesture hardens.
5. June 7, 2025: Overtime Elite guard Taylen Kinney launches canned 67 Water on 6/7.
6. October 15, 2025: South Park’s Season 28 premiere puts the chant inside a classroom.
7. October 28, 2025: Dictionary.com makes 67 Word of the Year.
8. May 1, 2026: Skrilla releases Z through Capitol Records and Priority Records.

The verses never asked for any of that. They describe a shooter, a belt, and a highway. The numbers sit on the drop like a shrug, which is the part that cloned.

Basketball Gave the Chant Its Hands

Drill did not carry 6-7 into lunchrooms. Basketball clips did. Editors needed a two-beat cue for slow-motion dunks, and LaMelo Ball’s listed height matched the lyric. The format was simple: say the numbers, hit the gong, cut to the play.

Kinney, a 6-foot-1 guard from Newport, Kentucky, and a Kansas commit, gave the meme a body. Overtime Elite filmed him ranking a Starbucks drink. He thought for a second, said “six, seven,” and moved his hands as if he were weighing two options. Skrilla later gave him the credit in plain terms: “TK started that though… he the one that started this right.”

Kinney picked up the nickname Mr. 67, then turned the joke into a product. 67 Water arrived on June 7, 2025. He has been called the first high school athlete to launch his own drink brand. The gesture that stuck is the one he used on that drink: palms up, alternating, a little seesaw.

WHO PUT 6-7 IN FRONT OF CAMERAS

• LaMelo Ball: Highlight edits used his 6-foot-7 frame as a visual rhyme for the lyric.
• Taylen Kinney: The Starbucks ranking clip and months of Overtime posts made him Mr. 67.
• Maverick Trevillian: The 67 Kid yelled the numbers at a game in March 2025 and locked in the face and the hands.
• Natasha Bedingfield: Her son kept saying it until she clocked the craze, then she shared a Philly stage with Skrilla at Theatre of the Living Arts.
• WWE and the NBA: Je’Von Evans, Oba Femi, and other jocks used the chant as a celebration, which kept it in arenas after classrooms tried to kill it.

That is the split the verses could not control. A Kensington drill record became sports B-roll, then a handshake, then a water can. The song’s violence receded. The hands stayed.

What 6-7 Means Depends on Who You Ask

Ask Skrilla on different days and you get different maps. On Genius Verified he said 67 “just represents my brain, like what comes up in my head.” He also said he never put an actual meaning on it and still would not want to. In other interviews he called it a turn from negative to positive, a change he tied to quitting lean before a 22-date headline run so he could “have my body together.”

A January 2026 sit-down added the block-level version: 6-7 points at 67th Street in Philly, where his “young bouls” are from. Fellow Philly rapper YSN Uth used the phrase first, and mutual friend DoodiBabby passed it up. Online, people also mapped it to 67th Street in Chicago, where Skrilla has family and where theories about the lyric like to live.

Linguist Taylor Jones, who works on African American English, has floated a third street reading. 10-67 is a police radio code used to notify of a death. That sits next to the dying-shooter line and to Jones’s read that the narrator is playing innocent at a traffic stop. Dictionary.com, covering how kids actually use it, noted a fourth sense: “so-so,” or “maybe this, maybe that,” especially with the palms-up gesture.

THE COMPETING STORIES ABOUT 6-7

None of those readings canceled the others, which is the trick. A phrase that can mean a block, a body, a height, a shrug, and a recovery story is easy to copy and hard to police. Skrilla has allowed the pile-up. He has also kept adding new labels, then taking them back.

Numerology Class at South Park Elementary

By October 15, 2025, the chant had enough reach for South Park’s Season 28 premiere. South Park Studios logged a clip titled “6-7” from that episode. In it, a craze hits the school and the students are sent to a presentation on Satanic numerology and the coming of the Antichrist. Butters works the numbers into wake-up times, homework problems, even an A1C joke. The adults hear a cult. The kids hear a punchline.

That is the same split teachers trying to halt the chant had been living with since summer. A two-digit aside can stop a math lesson because the number is also the joke. Dictionary.com later noted teachers trading tips online about how to get students to stop saying 67 all day. Some schools moved to bans. The bans fed the bit.

Bedingfield treated the same noise as a door. She has said she was “very impressed by Skrilla,” calling him “a true artist and visionary,” and she applauded him for putting cameras on people most pop stages skip. He said he wanted to let 6-7 “keep living a little bit,” and that she was trying to get on a remix. The Grammy winner and the Kensington rapper sharing a Philly stage is the kind of collision only a blank catchphrase can force.

67 Became a Dictionary Entry

Thirteen days after South Park put the chant in a classroom, Dictionary.com made it official. Lexicographers looked at headlines, social traffic, and search. Searches for 67 had risen more than sixfold since June 2025, they wrote, and most other two-digit numbers showed no trend. Spell it 67, 6-7, 6 7, or six-seven. Do not say sixty-seven.

Perhaps the most defining feature of 67 is that it’s impossible to define. It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical. In other words, it has all the hallmarks of brainrot.

Dictionary.com, 2025 Word of the Year announcement

The same post said the term still matters to the people who use it because of the connection it makes. A timed 67 tells the room you are in on the gag. Used as a reply to “How was school?” it is a closed door. Dictionary.com even flagged spinoffs, six-sendy and 41, for kids who wanted the next rung.

That is the irony the honor baked in. A drill hook about a dying shooter won a language prize for having no content. Skrilla’s recovery story, the 67th Street story, and the police-code story all lost to the empty version, because emptiness is what a fourth-grader can repeat without knowing Kensington.

Almost two years after the leak, the public definition has not moved. People still have to explain that it means nothing. The explanation is now part of the joke.

Skrilla Has to Rap After 6-7

He has called the brainrot run “a dream come true.” He has also had to build a career around a hook that belongs to children who have not heard the album. In January 2026 he described himself as more sober than he used to be, and as a father of two daughters with two more children on the way. He started rapping in 2018 when his first child was born. House arrest for dealing ate two and a half years of high school. He still talks about Kensington as home, not as a set.

I feel like I’m a good mascot for Kensington. I make it look good, I make it look bad, I make it look how it look.

Skrilla, 2026 interview

On May 1, 2026, that mascot job met a major-label clock. Z arrived as a 23-track debut on Capitol and Priority, about 65 minutes long, opened and closed by “Black Jesus” pieces voiced by a Kensington resident rather than a hired narrator. Features included Lil Yachty on “Rich Sinners” and YoungBoy Never Broke Again on “Free 40.” The title, he had said earlier, stood for the end of the alphabet, the end of a lot of things, and Zombie Land: “the ending and the change of life, change of lifestyle.”

He told a podcast that “Doot Doot (6 7)” would sit in Grand Theft Auto VI and that he would appear as himself. Rockstar has not confirmed it. Some players treated the boast as a spoiler and hoped the song would be cut for that reason alone. The claim is still his.

AP later quoted him on the whole run: “Everything that ‘6-7′ has brought to me excites me.” He still drops the numbers in conversation and reposts strangers using them. The Word of the Year remains a blank. The album is 23 tracks of the block that the blank erased.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Other Words Made Dictionary.com’s 2025 Shortlist?

The 2025 shortlist sat beside 67 and included agentic, aura farming, broligarchy, clanker, the dynamite emoji as a Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce tag, Gen Z stare, kiss cam, overtourism, tariff, and tradwife. 67 beat that list because two digits with no definition moved through schools and searches faster than the policy words.

Who Produced Doot Doot (6 7)?

The credits list 1Ellis as producer, with songwriting by Jemille Edwards and Ellis Uhl. Priority Records issued the official file on February 7, 2025, after the December 2024 Instagram leak.

Did Rockstar Put 6-7 in GTA 6?

Skrilla said on Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast that he was waiting for GTA 6 and that “6 7 is on there, too,” adding that he would appear as himself playing his own music. That remains an artist claim. Rockstar has not issued a soundtrack confirmation tied to the song.

What Children’s Song Does the Track Interpolate?

Songfacts notes an interpolation of the children’s song “Baby Shark” inside “Doot Doot (6 7).” That sitcom collision, a toddler earworm under a dying-shooter bar, is easy to miss if you only know the chant.

When Did Skrilla Start Rapping?

He has said he started in 2018, the year his first child was born. By the January 2026 interviews he was father to two daughters, with two more children on the way, and he was trying to write from a life that no longer meant sitting the block all day.