15 September 2020
Eighty-six or 86 originated in restaurant slang with the meaning that an item was out of stock. It soon also came to mean to eject or not serve a customer. It has passed into general slang to mean to cancel something or someone. Why the number eighty-six was chosen is not known. There are number of explanations floating about, but only two are plausible: that it is rhyming slang or that it is simply an arbitrary assignment of a number in a larger numbering scheme.
The term appears in the late 1920s or early 1930s in the United States. George Manker Watters and Arthur Hopkins’s 1927 play Burlesque contains an exchange where a waiter uses eighty-six, but it seems to be in the opposite sense, that of being able to supply something in short supply, in this case liquor in the days of Prohibition:
Waiter...If you need any Scotch or gin, sir—...My number is Eighty Six...
Skid...Yeah. Eighty Six. I know.
(Waiter exits R. Skid draws enormous flask from pocket.)
The first recorded, clear use of the current slang sense is in a Walter Winchell newspaper column from 23 May 1933:
A Hollywood soda-jerker forwards this glossary of soda-fountain lingo out there... “Shoot one” and Draw one” is one coke and one coffee... “Shoot one in the red!” means a cherry coke... An “echo” is a repeat order... “Eighty-six” means all out of it... “Eighty-one” is a glass of water... “Thirteen” means one of the big bosses is drifting around... A “red ball” is an orangeade.
By 1947 it had become a verb, as can be seen by this item in the 5 February 1947 issue of Variety, which also shows the term had moved beyond the food service industry:
Jeffries Eighty-Sixed?
Hollywood, Feb. 4.
Disk jockeys test their weight tonight when vocalist, Herb Jeffries, is named initial candidate for jockey’s nix list. He failed to show as promised to substitute for Bob McLaughlin, ill, on pilot’s daily show over KLAC, here. McLaughlin will ask his fellows to play no more Jeffries platters, and has had it indicated by organization sparkers, Bill Anson and Peter Potter that they’ll press the measure at regular meeting tonight.
Various explanations have been put forward for the term. The most plausible is that it is rhyming slang for nix. The only issue with this explanation is the existence of a more comprehensive numbering scheme, as evidenced by Winchell’s column. The larger scheme suggests the assignment of this meaning to eighty-six may be arbitrary.
Most of the other proffered explanations aren’t worth mentioning as there is no evidence to support them, but there is one frequently comes up that needs to be dismissed. This explanation holds that eighty-six comes from Chumley’s Bar at 86 Bedford Street in Manhattan. Chumley’s opened as a Prohibition-era speakeasy in 1922 and closed its doors for the last time in 2020, a victim of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the chronology works, there is no evidence tying Chumley’s to the slang term, and the explanation has all the hallmarks of an after-the-fact attempt to make sense of an arcane term.
Sources:
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. eighty-six, adj., eighty-six, v.
“Jeffries Eighty-Sixed?” Variety, 5 February 1947, 46. ProQuest.
Lighter, J. E. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Random House: 1994, s.v. eighty-six.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. eighty-six, n.
Winchell, Walter. “On Broadway” (syndicated column). Times-Union (Albany, New York), 23 May 1933, 8. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.