to 86 something

The popular story

Ask around a bar or a kitchen and you will collect half a dozen confident explanations. One says the term comes from Chumley’s, a former speakeasy at 86 Bedford Street in New York, where unwanted drinkers were supposedly shown the door at number 86. Another claims it began as soda-fountain code, one of a series of numbers staff called out so customers would not understand. A third ties it to a standard depth for graves, or to a rule about how far a rowdy patron had to be pushed from the premises. The stories are colourful, mutually contradictory, and mostly undatable.

What they share is a neat, single-origin shape: a specific place, code, or rule that the number is said to encode. That tidiness is itself a warning sign, because it is exactly the kind of after-the-fact rationalisation that tends to grow up around a word whose real beginnings no one recorded.

What the record shows

The documented history is shorter and plainer than the legends. The earliest known appearance in print is from 1920, in the Topeka Daily State Journal, which explains the term for readers who did not yet know it:

“Eighty-six” means just what “Thirty” does to a printer—”That’s all. No more to come.”

By 1933 it turns up in the widely syndicated columns of Walter Winchell as part of a glossary of soda-fountain and lunch-counter slang, where ‘eighty-six’ meant that an item was all gone. The verb form, eighty-sixed, meaning to eject or cut off, is recorded a little later; a much-quoted 1948 example from the press describes a licensing board that ‘eighty-sixed’ two premises by shutting off their taps.

Crucially, the 1920 and 1933 citations sit inside a broader pattern: lunch counters and soda fountains used a whole range of numbers as shorthand, a private code that let staff communicate over the heads of customers. Various numbers stood for various instructions, and 86 was simply the one that came to mean ‘we are out of it’ or ‘do not serve’. That context matters, because it suggests the choice of 86 may have been one arbitrary entry in a numbered system rather than a code concealing some hidden word or address.

It is also worth noting what the record does not contain. There is no early documentation tying the term to Chumley’s bar, to a grave depth, or to any of the other pinpoint origins that circulate. Where those explanations can be checked, they appear later than the word itself, which is the classic signature of a story invented to explain a term after the fact rather than one that produced it.

The verdict

The verdict here is origin-unknown, and it needs stating carefully, because the earliest use is not unknown at all. We can date the word firmly to 1920. What no one can explain is why the number 86 was chosen. The leading scholarly suggestion is that it is rhyming slang for nix (to refuse or cancel), which fits the meaning well; but that is an educated guess, not a demonstrated derivation. The place-name and grave-depth stories have no supporting record and, where they can be checked, appear only after the word was already in use.

What we don’t know

We do not know who first said it, in what trade, or on what logic. The rhyming-slang theory is attractive but unproven; the numbered-code theory is plausible but leaves the specific figure unexplained. Anyone offering a single confident origin for the number itself is going beyond the evidence. The responsible summary is that the term is genuinely old in American slang, well dated from 1920, and etymologically opaque.

How it changed

The meaning has broadened steadily, and in a very traceable way. It began as counter slang for ‘out of stock’, a flat statement that a line was finished. From there it became the standard kitchen call for a dish no longer available on a given service, the sense in which most people first meet it today. Then it acquired a transitive verb: to 86 a customer is to refuse or eject them, and to 86 an item is to strike it deliberately rather than merely run out of it.

That verbal use is where the word gained its edge. Running out of something is passive; 86-ing something is a decision. Once the term carried that sense of a deliberate cutting-off, it was free to leave food service altogether. People began to 86 plans, proposals, relationships and policies, meaning to kill them off on purpose. The 1948 example of a licensing board that ‘eighty-sixed’ two bars by shutting their taps already shows this harder, more active meaning taking hold.

Usage today

In professional kitchens ’86’ remains everyday shorthand, called out when an ingredient runs low or a dish comes off the menu, and printed on tickets and boards so the whole line knows at a glance. Outside the trade it functions as a punchy verb for cancelling, dropping or removing something, whether a policy, a paragraph, or a person. The number has entirely detached from whatever originally produced it.

That detachment is, in a sense, the point of the whole story. A word can be perfectly well documented, in constant use, and still keep its origin secret. ’86’ is exactly such a case: we can watch it appear in 1920, spread through soda fountains in the 1930s, harden into a verb by the 1940s, and enter general speech thereafter, all without ever learning why the number itself was chosen. The honest entry leaves that blank unfilled rather than papering it over with a tidy legend.