We say it all the time. A big wedding with all the trimmings, a home renovation that touched every room, a road trip with every possible stop. They went the whole nine yards. But nine yards of what, exactly?
Here's the honest answer: nobody knows for sure. The phrase is an American expression meaning everything, the whole lot. Its earliest known appearance is in an 1855 Indiana comic story, and its first known use as an everyday idiom was in a small Indiana newspaper in 1907. Many popular explanations, including the famous machine-gun story, simply don't fit those dates.
The Shirt That Started It
The oldest known use comes from an 1855 Indiana story called "The Judge's Big Shirt." In it, a lawyer plays a prank on a judge friend who needs a new shirt for a fancy party. He orders a comically huge one, and the judge finds himself buried in a shirt five yards long and four yards wide.
Pretending to be innocent, the lawyer exclaims that he had told a woman to get just enough cloth for three shirts, but instead "she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt!" It was a punch line, not yet a common saying.
A Baseball Game in Mitchell, Indiana
The first known use of the phrase as an idiom showed up on May 2, 1907, in The Mitchell Commercial, a newspaper in the small town of Mitchell, Indiana. Describing a baseball game between the town team and local businessmen, the paper said it could not promise the full nine yards. The same paper used the phrase three more times over the next seven years.
Around the same time, people in Kentucky, South Carolina and elsewhere were saying the whole six yards. Experts think both versions are playful twists on the whole ball of wax, first recorded in the 1880s. That's the same family as the whole enchilada and the whole shebang. The number nine might be linked to the expression to the nines, meaning to perfection.
Why the Popular Theories Fall Short
One favorite story says World War II aircraft machine-gun belts were nine yards long. A variation points to the ammunition belts of the British Vickers gun in World War I. But since the phrase was already in print before World War I, that theory is no longer considered viable.
Other guesses involve the length of fabric for saris, Scottish kilts, burial shrouds or bolts of cloth. No source proves any of these. One article did show that fabric was routinely sold in standard lengths of nine yards during the 1800s and early 1900s, which may explain why so many garments get credited.
The Detectives Who Chased It Down
Much of the public interest in the mystery is thanks to New York Times language columnist William Safire, who wrote nine columns on it. A Yale librarian, Fred Shapiro, called it the most prominent etymological riddle of our time.
Many of the key finds came from Bonnie Taylor-Blake, a neuroscience researcher and amateur word sleuth, who dug up the Kentucky and Indiana examples between 2012 and 2013. The phrase itself became widely popular in the 1980s and 1990s. So the next time you go the whole nine yards, you can tell everyone the full story, or at least as much of it as anyone knows.
