Word.ws English Dictionary

deep six

deep six verb: to discard, get rid of, or cancel; to completely put an end to something.

Verb

deep six (third-person singular simple present deep sixes, present participle deep sixing, simple past and past participle deep sixed)

  1. (idiomatic, informal, transitive) To discard, get rid of, or cancel; to completely put an end to something.
    • 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.2021, John H. McWhorter, chapter 2, in Woke Racism, New York: Forum, →ISBN
  2. (idiomatic, informal, transitive, uncommon) To submerge (something) in water.

Noun

the deep six

  1. (idiomatic, informal) An ejection, discardment or destruction.
    • 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.1950, Boys' Life, page 21
    • I look at Kenny who looks at Jimmy...the three of us join Colm; we overpower Ingy and give him the deep six.2011, Nine Hundred Nights, Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 132
  2. (idiomatic, informal) The grave or death; also, the (notional) place where something is discarded.
    • The discretion of social conversation, even among friends, is exceeded only by the discretion of “the deep six,” that grave wherein nothing is mentioned at all.2004, Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, New Directions Publishing, →ISBN
    • Between the Brits and the Maharajas, there's pretty good reason to believe that at least 100,000 tigers got the deep six over the past hundred years.2007, Michael Tougias, When Man is the Prey: True Stories of Animals Attacking Humans, Macmillan, →ISBN, page 150

Examples of deep six in a sentence

  • 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.2017, Jay Franklin, Richard Wormser, John G. Schneider, The Comic Novel MEGAPACK, Wildside Press LLC, →ISBN, page 153:
  • Down in the deep six with eyes frozen till Judgment Day.2011, Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth: A Novel, Vintage, →ISBN, page 103:

Forms of deep six

third-person singular presentdeep sixes
present participledeep sixing
past participledeep sixed
pastdeep sixed
alternative formdeep-six

Origin of deep six

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.

Questions about deep six

What does deep six mean?
Deep six means to discard, get rid of, or cancel; to completely put an end to something.
How do you use deep six in a sentence?
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.
What part of speech is deep six?
Deep six can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of deep six?
The past tense of deep six is deep sixed.

Words near deep six in the dictionary

  1. deep rhetoric
  2. Deep River
  3. deep scattering layer
  4. deep sea
  5. deep seas
  6. deep six
  7. deep sixed
  8. deep sixes
  9. deep sixing
  10. deep sleep
  11. deep sleeps

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: deep six (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-deep six.ogg.

Cite this entry: “deep six.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/deep_six. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.