{"id":28093,"date":"2013-12-05T00:10:16","date_gmt":"2013-12-05T08:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/?p=28093"},"modified":"2013-12-05T00:45:01","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T08:45:01","slug":"origin-phrase-whole-nine-yards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2013\/12\/origin-phrase-whole-nine-yards\/","title":{"rendered":"The Origin of the Phrase “The Whole Nine Yards”"},"content":{"rendered":"
Byron asks: Where does “the whole 9 yards” come from?<\/div>\n

\"measurement\"<\/a>For those outside of North America who aren’t familiar, “the whole nine yards\u201d is an American phrase which loosely means \u201ceverything\u201d or \u201cthe full extent of something.\u201d As to the exact origin, it’s a slight mystery.\u00a0 One linguist called it \u201cthe bigfoot<\/a> of word origins\u201d because there are so many different origin theories about this phrase, but none of them can be proven and many can be easily debunked. You\u2019ll hear a lot of people say with conviction that they know exactly where the expression came from, but this is simply not true. Most of what you hear is, well, hearsay.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what we know for sure: the first time we found the phrase in print was in 1956 and 1957 in the Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground<\/i>, a publication put out by the US Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. Talking about hunters, author Ron Rhody wrote:\u00a0 \u201cSo that\u2019s the whole nine yards.\u201d (1956) and \u201cThese guys go the whole nine yards\u2014no halfway stuff for them.\u201d (1957)<\/p>\n

The great thing about this phrase entering American slang relatively late in the game is that the author of that article was still around to question when linguists started getting curious about the phrase\u2019s origin. Unfortunately, Rhody didn\u2019t have much to contribute. According to him, the phrase was making the rounds in Kentucky in the late 1950s, but he didn\u2019t know who had said it first or why.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole nine yards\u201d continued to show up in various publications throughout the 1960s, picking up steam toward the end of the decade when it could be found in newspaper advertisements, such as this one for a house in Florida, published in 1969:<\/p>\n

Four bedroom home, located in Country Club Estates. Running distance from Golf Course. Completed and ready to move in. This home has \u2018the whole nine yards\u2019 in convenience.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From there, the phrase continued to catch on, becoming popular enough to be used as the title of a movie starring Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s it for \u201cthe whole nine yards.\u201d There is, however, a bit more to the story (or a bit less, depending on how you look at it): a couple of 1912 articles that contain the phrase \u201cthe whole six yards.\u201d<\/p>\n

These articles, published in Kentucky\u2019s The Mount Vernon Signal<\/i>, mentioned telling \u201cthe whole six yards\u201d of a story, meaning the phrase likely meant what \u201cthe whole nine yards\u201d means today. They were followed by another mention in 1916 in the same paper, and a 1921 article titled \u201cThe Whole Six Yards of It\u201d which made no mention of the phrase in the actual article (about baseball).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s thought by some, though mostly just speculation, that the number was upped to nine at some point in the phrase\u2019s history, much like how \u201cCloud 7\u201d has become \u201cCloud 9.\u201d Nine is considered a \u201cperfect\u201d number in numerology.<\/p>\n

The question still remains, \u201cyards of what?\u201d The editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, Jesse Sheidlower, has an answer, but it isn\u2019t one fans of fanciful origin stories are going to like. On the topic, Sheidlower says,<\/p>\n

The existence of a six-yard variant shows pretty clearly that this is not about yards of anything. It\u2019s just a random number.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That said, the six-yard variant was only recently discovered, and it\u2019s possible that with this new information the origin of the phrase could eventually emerge. The number and the early-20th<\/sup> century timing do disprove nearly all of the theories about the nine-yard version, though. In case you\u2019re still unconvinced, however, here is a selection of those theories and further explanations about why they probably aren\u2019t true:<\/p>\n