deep six
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.85 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To discard, get rid of, or cancel; to completely put an end to something.
Informal; Transitive verb
Example Sentences
- "They had put many hundreds of hours into the project before it was deep-sixed by management."
- "We wonder why that mild-mannered woman we met at the faculty mixer was on the committee that came close to deep-sixing the career of a liberal professor who did nothing wrong."
- "Otherwise when Don got in trouble he might have really got the deep six. He had a pretty level head, though, and I guess that's what saved him."
- "I look at Kenny who looks at Jimmy...the three of us join Colm; we overpower Ingy and give him the deep six."
- "Aaron was sitting up in the backseat poking his fingers at his Game Boy, behaving fairly decently since he'd been warned that if he went into any kind of tantrum or mood, the Game Boy got the deep six."
- "The chief named Ape—pretty good name, too—said, “This guy's bothering you, Pan, Happy'll give him the deep six.” “Oh, no,” the monkey said."
Etymology
First use appears c. 1929 as a noun, most likely from the nautical cry by the deep six indicating a depth of six fathoms (36 feet, 11 metres) as measured by a sounding line (a depth at which something thrown overboard would be difficult to recover), though possibly also a reference to the common depth of graves (six feet). Attested since the 1950s as a verb.