It’s a phenomenon that has swept the nation and emerged seemingly out of nowhere in our nation’s high schools. The baffling expression ‘6-7’ has been entertaining children and annoying parents for months, but in fact it dates back to the 14th century and is one of the oldest modern English expressions.
When my 15-year-old son patiently tried to explain to me that “6-7” meant nothing, but was just something you said in jest when you heard the numbers together while making a weighing gesture with your hands, I asked him if it meant the same as “standing on sixes and sevens”?
(Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images.)
He didn’t know what that phrase meant, and to be honest, it’s quite mysterious. I’ve probably read too much PG Wodehouse, but it got me thinking that maybe this ‘6-7’ thing didn’t really appear out of nowhere. Maybe it’s very, very old, I thought.
Turns out that was a good instinct.
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The first use of “6-7” dates back to the 13th century, which is about as old as modern English can be. It referred to a dice game called Hazard that would eventually evolve into what we know as craps.
In the game, a player called out the number he was trying to shoot or make with two six-sided dice. Five, eight and nine were the most likely results. Six and seven, gamblers soon discovered through mathematics or experience, offered lower odds and therefore less chance of winning.
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From then on, six and seven together became forever associated with risk and worry. It can be found in the works of Chaucer and has grown quite steadily over the centuries.
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Almost three hundred years later, in 1595, William Shakespeare would use the phrase in his play ‘Richard II’, with the Duke of York saying: ‘I should go to Plashy too, but time does not permit. Everything is uneven and everything remains at six and seven.’
Again, in Shakespeare’s usage, six and seven mean risk, worry, and confusion.
Over the next few centuries, the phrase would become plural and popularized as “being on sixes and sevens,” meaning to be worried or confused, as in, “My check is late and my rent is due, I’m over it.”
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The main evidence linking this latest version of “6-7” to its medieval predecessor is the weighing motion with the hands. Visually it says, “It could be this, or it could be that.” It’s confusing, unclear, a matter of coincidence.
What does the permanence of this symbol, this expression used in our native language since its birth, really mean? What can it tell us, other than being just a little fun fact from history?
A two-digit combination set social media ablaze among teens in 2025, confusing parents and teachers — and now it’s officially been crowned Dictionary.com’s ‘Word of the Year’: 67. But even the organization that unveiled the winning word — pronounced “six-seven” and never “sixty-seven” — admitted it wasn’t exactly sure of its meaning. (Chris Delmas/AFP)
It tells us that we are much more closely connected intellectually to those who spoke our language 700 years ago than we think, that we almost never invent anything, but almost always borrow or reuse, as Shakespeare, our greatest writer, himself did.
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It was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who suggested that language is not only the vessel of our thoughts, but also its engine. Here we have the English language that has, for centuries, stubbornly demanded that these two numbers have special meanings.
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Therefore, it is vital to read old books and to let children read old books. They’re not actually old. They are, in fact, timeless in the sense that their contributions become indelible. We understand what we ourselves say much better when we understand those who said it first.
So, the next time your child starts giggling and says ‘6-7’, imagine he or she is doing it on the old-fashioned streets of Elizabethan London, because the people there at that moment would know exactly what it means, even better than we do.
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The history of English speaking people is much shorter than it seems, we are much more closely related to those long gone than we realize.
So as we enter the future of artificial intelligence and brave new worlds, let us remember that we find our real meaning, our real selves and what we are, in the past, not in the future, and just like ‘6-7’, the past will always find a way.
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