The whole nine yards

This article is about the phrase. For the film, see The Whole Nine Yards (film).

A 1921 headline from The Spartanburg Herald-Journal in South Carolina reads "The Whole Six Yards of It."

The whole nine yards or full nine yards is a colloquial American 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 as "the most prominent etymological riddle of our time."

The earliest known example of this phrase is from 1907 in southern Indiana. It 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" (to perfection).

The phrase was introduced to a national audience by Elaine Shepard in the Vietnam War novel The Doom Pussy (1967). 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 earliest known use of the phrase is from The Mitchell Commercial, a newspaper in the small town of Mitchell, Indiana, in their 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 phrase 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 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 (1966), and Elaine Shepard's The Doom Pussy (1967).

Research

William Safire, 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 (1997) 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; many of these are no longer viable in light of what is now known about the phrase's history.

• Perhaps the most commonly offered 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. This theory is no longer considered viable, since the phrase predates World War II. However an alternative weapon is the ammunition belt for the British Vickers machine gun, invented and adopted by the British Army before the first World War (1914–1918)
• Another common explanation is that "nine yards" is a cubic measure and refers to the volume of a concrete mixer. This theory, too, is inconsistent with the phrase's history.
• Many of the popular candidates relate to the length of pieces of fabric, or various garments; including Indian saris, Scottish Kilts, burial shrouds, or bolts of cloth. No single source verifies that any one of those suggestions was the actual origin. However, an article published in Comments on Etymology demonstrates that fabric was routinely sold in standard lengths of nine yards (and other multiples of three yards) during the 1800s and early 1900s. This may explain why so many different types of cloth or garments have been said to have been nine yards long.
• Other proposed sources include the volume of graves; the length of bridal veils, kilts, burial shrouds, bolts of cloth, or saris; a very long list; ritual disembowelment; shipyards; and American football. Little documentary evidence has surfaced to support any of these explanations.
• One proposed origin involves the world of full-rigged sailing ships, in which yard is used not as a measure of length or size, but as the name of each horizontal spar on which a sail is hung. All square-rigged sails unfurled, with 3 yards on each of 3 masts, could then be described as "the whole nine yards," but again no actual documentation has been uncovered to support this explanation.
• Bonnie Taylor-Blake, noting that several early examples are in the form "give" or "tell" the whole nine (or six) yards, has suggested that the idiom likely relied on "yards" as "lengthy or thorough presentation [of news, anecdotes, play-by-play, etc.]"
• 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."