Slang dictionary
69
or sixty-nine [siks-tee nahyn]
What does 69 mean?
If sex was a number, it’d be 69.
69Ā is slang for when two partners arrange their bodies to perform oral sex on one another at the same time in a way said to look like the number 69.
Where does 69 come from?
Vive la France!Ā The slang 69 goes back, if you can believe it, to the French Revolution. The term is found in a 1790 French work, The Whore’s Catechisms, attributed the revolutionary figureĀ ThĆ©roigne de MĆ©ricour, who described aĀ soixante-neuf, or “sixty-nine” in French.
English picked upĀ sixty-nine by the 1880s, with its numerical shorthand, 69, familiar by the 1970s.
As long as there have been humans, though, there probably has been the practice of a 69.Ā It’s described in the ancient IndianĀ Kama Sutra, for instance, as the Congress of a Crow position. The position involvesĀ different- or same-sex partners going down on each otherāgenitals or anusāat the same time, usually achieved by lying on their sides or one on top. That is unless the people involved take to the Standing 69 or Eiffel 69, known variants of the move.
If you’re looking any more detail from us, well, there are other websites for that.
69 is commonly referencedāand snickered aboutāin popular culture. R&B singer Rick James released “She Blew My Mind (69 Times)” in 1982, for instance, and Bryan Adams 1984 “Summer of ’69,” which puns on the peace-n-lovin’ year 1969. Rapper Daniel Hernandez is better known by his suggestive stage name,Ā 6ix9ine.
In in the 2000s, 69 = inspired something of a meme where internet users comment “nice” on just about any online content that happens to feature the number 69Ā (e.g., the poll shows that 69% of Americans approve of the new law).
Memebase – Cheezburger
Not that this is new. Pretty much all of us who are familiar with 69Ā make jokes whenever we encounter 69 in the wild, from phone numbers to jersey numbers to birthdays to license plates.
Examples of 69
Who uses 69?
69 is an adult, NSFW term, but it isn’t as offensive as a word likeĀ fuck so it can’t be that bad.
Outside of literal uses (including as a verb, to sixty-nine someone), 69 is used throughout the sex industry, from pornographic Twitter handles to sex to phone-sex telephone numbers, as a shorthand for anything “sex.”
Note
This is not meant to be a formal definition of 69 like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of 69 that will help our users expand their word mastery.