Where does the phrase ‘the whole nine yards’ come from?

Few phrases have had more origin stories pinned on them than the whole nine yards. Fighter pilots, concrete trucks, Scottish kilts, sailing ships, burial shrouds: each one has been offered up with total confidence. The awkward truth is that the evidence knocks almost all of them out of the running, and the real answer is a cheerful shrug.

The short answer

The origin is unknown. The earliest known idiomatic use appeared in the Mitchell Commercial, a small newspaper in Mitchell, Indiana, in 1907, in a piece about a local baseball game, as ‘the full nine yards’. The same paper printed ‘the whole nine yards’ in 1908. That is years before World War I, let alone World War II.

The real story

For decades the phrase seemed to appear out of nowhere in the 1960s, and the guessing game ran wild. The New York Times language columnist William Safire wrote about it again and again. Then amateur sleuths with newspaper databases started digging, and the date kept moving backwards.

Researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake and Yale librarian Fred Shapiro found a run of examples of the whole six yards from 1912 onwards, in papers in Kentucky, Arkansas, South Carolina and elsewhere. Then Taylor-Blake turned up the Indiana uses from 1907 and 1908. There is also an 1855 comic story about a judge’s oversized shirt where a seamstress uses ‘the whole nine yards’ of cloth, but that is a literal measurement, not the idiom.

The six-yard versions are the real spoiler. If the phrase came from something that genuinely measured nine yards, people would not have been happily saying six. That suggests the number was never the point. It was probably just a bit of regional slang from the Indiana, Kentucky and Arkansas area meaning ‘the whole lot’, much like the whole shebang, which only reached print later.

As for meaning, researchers still disagree. Taylor-Blake has noted that early examples often talk about telling or giving the whole six or nine yards, so ‘yards’ may have meant a long, complete account. Other lexicographers think the phrase never had a fixed literal meaning at all.

Why people get it wrong

The machine-gun story is wonderfully vivid. Pilots supposedly carried ammunition belts about nine yards long, and giving an enemy ‘the whole nine yards’ meant firing the lot. Some aircraft belts really were roughly that length. But a 1907 baseball preview cannot be quoting a war that had not happened yet.

The other theories fail in the same way. There is no evidence for the kilt, the sari, the concrete mixer or the ship’s rigging. A neat explanation is simply more satisfying than ‘we don’t know’, so the stories keep getting retold long after the newspapers have ruled them out.

“Turns out the whole nine yards was six yards for a while, and nobody knows why. Honestly, I find that comforting. I lose track of my own measurements constantly.”