The whole nine yards

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". One explanation is that it is to do with cutting material "A tailor making a high quality suit uses more fabric. The best suits are made from nine yards of fabric."

The Oxford English Dictionary finds the earliest use in a story in a 1955 Indiana newspaper article. A later 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.

The Oxford English Dictionary places the earliest use of the phrase in the New Albany (Indiana) Daily Ledger, January 30, 1955 in an article called "The Judge's Big Shirt." “What a silly, stupid woman! I told her to get just enough to make three shirts; instead of making three, she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt!” Such a later use of the phrase is from The Mitchell Commercial, a newspaper in the small town of Mitchell, Indiana, in its 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.

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