Could a term meant to communicate 'We're out of strawberry ice cream, so tell people who try to order it that they'll have to choose something else' morph into 'We no longer want that person on our property show him the door' or 'Dump that batch of vaccine something's wrong with it'? More simply, how does 'We don't have any' become 'Get rid of what we have'? The meaning of 86 advanced by the restaurant code hypothesis presents it as an announcement that an eatery has run out of a particular item, whereas the usage people are familiar with positions 86 as a command that something or someone be gotten rid of. The most widely accepted theory of the term's origin states it derives from a code supposedly used in some restaurants in the 1930s, wherein 86 was a shortform among restaurant workers for 'We're all out of it.' Snippets of said code were published in newsman Walter Winchell's column in 1933, where it was presented as part of a 'glossary of soda-fountain lingo.'

An 'eighty-six', in the patois of western dispensers, means: 'Don't serve him.'' but Barrymore was known in that cubby as an 'eighty-six'. There has been lots of speculation as to where the term originated but the most plausible is Article 86 of the New York liquor code which gives the reasons a person may be removed from a bar.Īccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first verifiable use of 86 in the 'refuse service to' sense dates to a 1944 book about John Barrymore, a movie star of the 1920s famous for his acting and infamous for his drinking: 'There was a bar in the Belasco building. The term is mostly used in bars throughout the U.S.

To 86 someone is to bar them off your property. One of the many oddball terms that has crept into the English language in the past century is a peculiarly inexplicable one: the verbal shortform of '86' to mean 'to dismiss or quash,' 'to bar entry or further service to,' and even 'to kill.' While its uses have come to be widespread (one can say that the bank 86'd your scheme to have it underwrite the start-up costs of your business venture, or that a friend who made a spectacle of himself in a bar was 86'd from the place, or that a Mob boss had a particularly troublesome competitor 86'd), the origin of this now omnibus term remains obscure:Įxample:

Casinos off 86