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". Its first usage was the punch line of an 1855 Indiana comedic short story titled "The Judge's Big Shirt".

The humorous anecdote follows Judge A., who regularly neglected packing a second shirt during his travels. He arrives in Raleigh, North Carolina, as part of a business trip. While hoping to find a shirt to borrow, he hints to his lawyer friend (Mr. C.) that he needs one in order to attend a prominent party the following evening. (The narrator clarifies that ready-made shirts were not purchasable "in those days", likely setting the story in the early 19th or late 18th century.) To teach Judge A. a lesson, Mr. C. specifically orders a comically large shirt and promises to have it delivered before the party. Minutes before their departure, the shirt arrives; Judge A. initially praises the craftsmanship, then struggles to pull it on, until he "[finds] himself enshrouded in a shirt five yards long and four yards broad". He is unable to see beyond the collar and expresses his astonishment at the "monstrous shirt".</blockquote>

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 (i.e., tell someone a big story), take the whole nine yards (i.e., take everything), and settled the whole nine yards (i.e., resolved everything).

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 six-yard form of the phrase also appears in a 1917 Arkansas paper ("...he may write me personally and I'll give him the whole six yards."); a South Carolina newspaper headline;, and in the text of a 1927 Missouri paper ("we heard the whole six yards--where did you lose your letter?").

Post-war usages of "the whole/full nine yards" have been found between 1946 and 1951 in a Lexington, Kentucky newspaper and in a 1956 issue of Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground, where it appears in an article on fishing. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1997) cited Shepard's novel, thus pushing the earliest known usage back to 1967.

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; This may explain why so many different types of cloth or garments have been said to have been nine yards long. The phrase "...she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt" appears in 1855.

One explanation is that World War II (1939–1945) aircraft machine gun belts were nine yards long. There are many versions of this explanation with variations regarding type of plane, nationality of gunner and geographic area. An alternative weapon is the ammunition belt for the British Vickers machine gun, invented and adopted by the British Army before World War I (1914–1918). The standard belt for this gun held 250 rounds of ammunition and was approximately twenty feet ( yards) in length. This theory is no longer considered viable, since the phrase predates World War I.
Another common explanation is that "nine yards" is a cubic measure and refers to the volume of a concrete mixer. but again no actual documentation has been uncovered to support this explanation, and in any case not all ships had exactly three yards on each mast, even disregarding the fact that by no means all sailing vessels were three-masters.
Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large for the Oxford English Dictionary, and Fred R. Shapiro have argued that the phrase does not have a concrete meaning, pointing to the variance between six and nine yards and comparing it to the whole shebang.

External links

'The Whole Nine Yards' Myth: Debunked by Firearms Expert Jonathan Ferguson, Royal Armouries, YouTube