Our Word of the Year highlights the trends, conversations, and cultural moments that define how we communicate in real life and online. This year, 67 made a huge impact! 💥 These two formerly innocuous numbers surged across TikTok, classrooms, and headlines.

— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) Mar 2026

Every year, the announcement of a word of the year generates a predictable mix of recognition, debate, and bafflement. Some choices feel inevitable, capturing something that has genuinely saturated the cultural conversation. Others feel deliberately obscure, as though the selecting organisation is trying to demonstrate awareness of a linguistic corner that most of the population has never visited. The selection of ‘67’ as this year’s word of the year falls firmly into the second category, and the internet’s response has been a collective and rather satisfying shrug of collective confusion.

What the Word of the Year Actually Is

The word of the year is an annual tradition maintained by several major dictionary publishers and language organisations, each of which selects a word or phrase that they judge to have had particular cultural significance or linguistic momentum over the preceding twelve months. The selections often reflect broader social trends, with words related to technology, politics, or viral cultural moments frequently making the shortlist. What is less common is a selection that leaves a substantial proportion of the population genuinely uncertain what the word means or how it is used, which is precisely the situation that the choice of ‘67’ has produced this cycle.

The Origins of 67 as Slang

The number 67 has its roots in UK drill music, specifically associated with the South London collective who released a string of influential tracks in the mid-2010s and helped define the sound that would eventually influence music globally. Over time, the name became detached from its original context and began to circulate more widely as slang, used in ways that are not always consistent or traceable to a single fixed meaning. This is characteristic of how slang works: terms migrate from their original communities of use, acquiring new resonances and sometimes losing their original specificity entirely. The result can be a word that means different things in different contexts.

Key Details

Why Nobody Can Agree on the Definition

The difficulty with ‘67’ as a word of the year is precisely this instability of meaning. Asked to define it, people offer a range of answers: it is used as an intensifier, as a term of approval, as a reference to the group, as slang for a specific action or quality, or as a general-purpose exclamation with contextual meaning. Linguists would recognise this as characteristic of slang in the process of diffusion, when a term is spreading beyond its original community of use but has not yet settled into a stable meaning that crosses community boundaries. The selection committee presumably understood this, but the choice has still generated substantial confusion.

The Annual Debate About Whether These Selections Matter

The word of the year announcement always prompts a secondary debate about whether the tradition itself is meaningful. Critics argue that the selections are increasingly driven by a desire for attention rather than a genuine assessment of linguistic significance, and that prioritising obscure slang over widely used terms reflects performative coolness rather than serious lexicography. Defenders counter that the word of the year serves a useful function in prompting conversations about how language changes and what those changes reveal about the culture producing them. The ‘67’ selection is likely to intensify both sides of this recurring argument considerably.

How Social Media Has Responded

Social media reaction to the selection has ranged from genuine enthusiasm among those familiar with drill culture and its linguistic legacy to bafflement and mild irritation among those who feel excluded by the choice. A significant number of people have posted asking for a definition, generating responses that range from helpful explanations to deliberate misdirection, which is itself a characteristic feature of how internet culture processes moments of shared confusion. The word trends in terms of conversation volume precisely because so many people are asking what it means rather than because they are using it, raising interesting questions about what cultural significance actually consists of.

What You Need to Know

Previous Words of the Year and What They Tell Us

Looking back at previous words of the year provides useful context for the current selection. Earlier choices have included terms like ‘selfie’, ‘post-truth’, ‘vax’, ‘goblin mode’, and ‘rizz’ — a progression that traces the movement from social media culture to political discourse to pandemic language to increasingly niche slang. The trajectory suggests that each selection has pushed slightly further into territory that a mainstream audience finds unfamiliar, either because the word is genuinely new or because it originates in a community not typically represented in mainstream cultural conversation. ‘67’ continues this pattern in particularly pronounced form.

What Linguists Make of the Choice

Linguists have offered a range of assessments. Some have welcomed the selection as recognition of how music cultures shape language more broadly, arguing that drill music’s influence on contemporary British English is significant and underacknowledged in official records. Others have questioned whether a number being used as slang constitutes a ‘word’ in a meaningful sense, and whether its geographic and demographic spread is wide enough to justify the designation. The debate is instructive less for what it reveals about ‘67’ specifically than for what it reveals about the assumptions embedded in the word of the year tradition itself.

The Bigger Story About Language and Culture

Beneath the confusion and debate, the ‘67’ selection points to a genuine and important story about how language is changing in contemporary Britain. The influence of drill music on everyday speech, particularly among younger people in urban areas, represents a significant linguistic development that mainstream culture has been slow to acknowledge. The word of the year is one mechanism through which that acknowledgement happens, however imperfectly. That many people do not recognise the word is itself informative — it reveals the distance between different communities of linguistic practice in a country where those communities often exist in close proximity but with limited mutual comprehension.

The Impact

The selection of ‘67’ as word of the year will be forgotten before the next announcement, as most selections are. But the conversation it has sparked is worth preserving. It has prompted people to ask questions about where language comes from, about whose cultural expressions receive official recognition, and about what it means to name a word of the year in a society with as much linguistic diversity as contemporary Britain. These are not small questions, and they deserve more sustained attention than the annual word of the year cycle typically allows. In that sense, a confusing selection may ultimately be more valuable than a comfortable one.