The whole nine yards


"The whole nine yards" or "the full nine yards" is a colloquial American English phrase meaning "everything, the whole lot" or, when used as an adjective, "all the way", as in, "The Army came out and gave us the whole nine yards on how they use space systems." Its origin is unknown and has been described by Yale University librarian Fred R. Shapiro as "the most prominent etymological riddle of our time".
The Oxford English Dictionary finds the earliest published non-idiomatic use in an 1855 Indiana newspaper article. The earliest known idiomatic use of the phrase is from 1907 in Southern Indiana. The phrase is related to the expression the whole six yards, used around the same time in Kentucky and South Carolina. Both phrases are variations on the whole ball of wax, first recorded in the 1880s. They are part of a family of expressions in which an odd-sounding item, such as enchilada, shooting match, shebang or hog, is substituted for ball of wax. The choice of the number nine may be related to the expression "To the nines".
Use of the phrase became widespread in the 1980s and 1990s. Much of the interest in the phrase's etymology can be attributed to New York Times language columnist William Safire, who wrote extensively on this question.

History of the phrase

The Oxford English Dictionary places the earliest published non-idiomatic use of the phrase in the New Albany Daily Ledger in an article called "The Judge's Big Shirt." "What a silly, stupid woman! I told her to get just enough to make three shirts; instead of making three, she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt!" The first known use of the phrase as an idiom appears in The Mitchell Commercial, a newspaper in the small town of Mitchell, Indiana, in its May 2, 1907 edition:
This afternoon at 2:30 will be called one of the baseball games that will be worth going a long way to see. The regular nine is going to play the business men as many innings as they can stand, but we can not promise the full nine yards.

The idiom was used three more times in the Mitchell Commercial over the next seven years, in the forms give him the whole nine yards, take the whole nine yards, and settled the whole nine yards.
In other uses from this time period, the phrase was given as the whole six yards. In 1912, a local newspaper in Kentucky asked readers to, "Just wait boys until the fix gets to a fever heat and they will tell the whole six yards." The same newspaper repeated the phrase soon afterward in another issue, stating "As we have been gone for a few days and failed to get all the news for this issue we will give you the whole six yards in our next." The six-yard form of the phrase also appears in a 1921 headline in a local South Carolina paper.
The phrase is not known to have been used in writing thereafter until a 1956 issue of Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground, where it appears in an article on fishing. After describing the contests and prizes, the author writes, "So that's the whole nine-yards." It appeared in an article on hunting the following year, this time unhyphenated.
The phrase at this point was still rare. There is strong circumstantial evidence it was not in general use in 1961, as Ralph Boston set a world record for the long jump that year at 27 feet, or nine yards, but no news report has been found that made any reference to the term, suggesting that journalists were unaware of it or did not regard it as common enough to use as a pun.
In a short story published in 1962, the phrase is attributed to "a brush salesman". A letter published in an auto magazine later that year describes a certain new car as containing "all nine yards of goodies". In 1964, several newspapers published a syndicated story which explained that "Give 'em the whole nine yards" was NASA talk for an item-by-item report. This early usage can be read as suggesting length, but can also be read as suggesting detailed completeness.
Two 1965 newspaper articles quote U.S. military personnel serving in Vietnam using the phrase. The phrase was explained as something "teenagers say" in a military-oriented magazine in 1965. Citations from 1966 show the phrase was used by a former U.S. Army airman, and also in a publication for military test pilots. It is also recorded in two contemporary novels concerning the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam, Carl Krueger's Wings of a Tiger, and Elaine Shepard's The Doom Pussy.

Research

, a language columnist at the New York Times, asked listeners for information regarding the origin of the phrase on Larry King's radio show in 1982. Safire ended up writing nine columns on this subject and is largely responsible for the interest in it. In 1986, the phrase was added to the Oxford English Dictionary with the earliest citation given as 1970. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang cited Shepard's novel, thus pushing the earliest known usage back to 1967.
Several key discoveries in further antedating the phrase were made by Bonnie Taylor-Blake, a neuroscience researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an amateur member of the American Dialect Society, an association of professional and amateur linguists whose mailing list often serves as a forum for word and phrase discoveries. In 2012, Taylor-Blake discovered the 1956 and 1957 uses in Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground, and later that year she and Fred R. Shapiro found the "whole six yards" examples from the 1912–1921 period, which received substantial publicity. In 2013, Taylor-Blake posted her discovery of the Mitchell Commercial uses from the 1907–1914 period.

Origin

There is still no consensus on the origin, though many early published quotations are now available for study. A vast number of explanations for this phrase have been suggested; however many of these are no longer viable in light of what is now known about the phrase's history.