What is the ‘6-7’ meme? How a number became Gen Alpha’s favourite inside joke

The viral “6-7” meme has taken over TikTok, classrooms and comment sections, becoming Gen Alpha’s favourite inside joke — even as adults struggle to understand what it means.

If you have children or spend any time on TikTok or YouTube Shorts, chances are you’ve heard the phrase “6-7” being repeated — often loudly, randomly and with exaggerated emphasis on the seven. What sounds like a meaningless string of numbers has become one of the internet’s most baffling inside jokes.

So much so that Dictionary.com named “6-7” its Word of the Year for 2025, citing how the phrase captures Gen Alpha’s love for absurd, context-free humour and their ability to turn randomness into shared culture.

From classrooms to comment sections, the phrase has left parents and teachers confused, while younger users burst into laughter simply because others don’t understand it. The meme originated on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, but its journey spans hip-hop, basketball culture and internet engagement farming.

Here’s a closer look at what “6-7” means, how it started, and why it has taken over Gen Alpha’s online and offline conversations.

How did the ‘6-7’ meme start?

Much of the internet’s understanding of the “6-7” trend comes from Instagram videos shared online. One user, @seleenjanea, broke down the meme’s origins by tracing it back to music, basketball culture and online engagement tactics.

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According to her explanation, the trend began in December 2024 with the release of rapper Skrilla’s song Doot Doot. In this song, Skrilla says the phrase “six-seven” quite a few times and his fans started pulling short edits from the song and combining them with various unrelated videos. This song and the phrase “six-seven” gained a lot of popularity for this and other reasons, and December 2022 is regarded as the song's breakout month.

In the middle of the surge to popularity for Skrilla's song, a lot of different “LaMelo Ball” basketball highlight edits started making their way around the Internet. LaMelo, a point guard known for his flashy playing style, also happens to be approximately 6 feet 7 inches tall. Creators began pairing Skrilla’s audio with clips of LaMelo scoring baskets, unintentionally linking the number “6-7” to basketball edits.

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The trend gained further traction when Taylon Kinney, a high school basketball player known for leaning into internet humour, began repeating “6-7” in casual videos and interviews. One widely shared clip shows Kinney rating a Starbucks drink by saying “six… six… six-seven,” a moment that resonated strongly with younger audiences already familiar with the meme.

As @seleenjanea notes in her video, the humour escalated as Gen Alpha began repeating the phrase simply because it confused adults. The randomness of “6-7,” combined with its roots in hip-hop and basketball culture, helped turn it into an inside joke — one that spread rapidly across TikTok, YouTube Shorts and classrooms alike.

How did it go viral?

The tipping point came when short, low-context videos began circulating — including one TikTok of a child yelling “6-7” into the camera just before a basket is scored at a basketball game. The randomness of the moment, combined with the recognisable audio, made it highly shareable.

From there, the meme took on a life of its own. The child's face was remixed over and over using distorted edits, hit with different quirky filters to make animations, then it was all paired with strange yet recognisable audio. The phrase “6-7” was solidified as a meme to be used even by those who had no idea of the phrase's origin.

What does ‘6-7’ actually mean?

As for the meaning of ‘6-7,’ the meaning is actually… well, nothing.

Some users have jokingly suggested it refers to something being “mid” or average, but most creators agree that the appeal lies in its meaninglessness. In a TikTok explaining the trend, content creator Philip Lindsay summed it up by saying that “6-7” is simply “a number that’s fun to say” — popular because of its sound, delivery and shared recognition, not because it carries a message.

In many ways, “6-7” functions as a harmless substitute for older joke numbers like 69 — something that reliably gets a laugh in a classroom without any adult or sexual connotations.

Why is it so popular with Gen Alpha?

The popularity of “6-7” reflects a broader shift in internet humour among younger generations. Gen Alpha, which has grown up fully immersed in short-form video platforms, gravitates towards absurdist humour — jokes that deliberately lack context or meaning.

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The humour isn’t in the number itself, but in being part of an inside joke that adults don’t immediately understand. Saying “6-7” becomes a way of signalling membership in a shared online culture, much like earlier meme cycles among Millennials and Gen Z.

As with most internet trends, its lifespan may be limited. As adults begin to decode and explain it — and as it appears in mainstream media — the mystery that made it funny in the first place starts to fade.

That said, some of the more surreal edits spawned by the trend continue to circulate, ensuring that “6-7,” for now, still lingers as one of the internet’s stranger cultural moments.