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:
