666liù liù liù

Awesome, so smooth

666！Nice!

666 means “awesome” or “so smooth”. People send it, often as a long row of sixes, when someone pulls off something skillful: a great move in a game, a clever trick, a perfect parking job.

Took off: 2016
Started in: League of Legends game chat
Today: Now everyday Chinese

What it means

Six is liù. It sounds like 溜 (liū), which means “smooth” or “slick” in casual speech, so three sixes say “smooth, smooth, smooth”.

More sixes mean more praise: 666666 is a crowd going wild. It can also be sarcastic, for a spectacular mistake.

How people use it

It is common in live-stream comments, game chats and replies to friends. It is casual praise, so leave it out of a work email.

More examples

你一个人把柜子搬上六楼了？666！
nǐ yí gè rén bǎ guì zi bān shàng liù lóu le? 666!
You carried the cabinet up to the sixth floor by yourself? Awesome!
这波操作666，对面都没反应过来。
zhè bō cāo zuò 666, duì miàn dōu méi fǎn yìng guò lai.
That play was slick. The other team didn’t even react.

For the word itself and how to reply to it, see 666 in the slang dictionary.

Where it came from

It started in game chat. A 2016 TechNode article, which cites Baidu, says Chinese League of Legends players were the first to type sixes to praise good play.

From there it moved to the bullet comments of game live streams. In 2020 Chinanews reported that 666 had topped Douyu’s yearly list of the ten most-sent bullet comments three years in a row, and that WeChat had added a 666 emoji.

There is a hand sign for it too: the thumb and the little finger out, the Chinese sign for six, shaken in the air.

The WeChat 666 emoji: a smug yellow face with half-closed eyes, a hand under its chin and a red 666 above its head — The original meme image. The [666] emoji that WeChat (Tencent) added in November 2020; image via Emojiall. Source

Sources

TechNode: what “666” means in China, July 2016 (technode.com)
Chinanews: WeChat adds 666 to its emoji, November 2020 (in Chinese) (chinanews.com.cn)

Checked November 2026. The picture at the top is our own drawing of 灯灯. The original meme image belongs to its owner and is shown to explain the meme. To ask us to remove it, write to legal@dengdeng.app.