Nah, nine yards is the height of the stack of printed articles purporting to explain the nine yards.
Whoa! 
It’s a nuance, and you can probably invent counter examples, but let’s use 2 of the popular “origins” for the phrase.
If a machine gun belt is 9 yards long, saying that you gave the enemy “the whole nine yards” means that you dumped every possible bullet on them. It might have only taken half the belt to kill them all, or to adequately suppress them. Or you could have been more selective in your fire. Saying you gave them the whole nine yards is saying that you dumped every possible resource at the threat, whether it was needed it or not. Think the scene in Predator with the minigun.
I think a better example is the one where the ream of fabric for a dress is nine yards long. You can make a dress with less material. A simple A line dress or some basic shift with 3 or 4 yards, maybe less. But using the whole nine yards of fabric means that you’re not just making a dress, you’re making a really extravagant dress with lots of embellishment. That’s the important emotion that the phrase is intended to communicate.
You wouldn’t typically use the phrase when you simply used all of something. You would use the phrase when you used all of something when less might have served. You used it all to make a statement or because the circumstances were extreme. The usage of the phrase implies a superlative.
That sounds identical to the way I’d use the whole ball of wax, shebang, enchilada, etc. It’s not just what you need, it’s everything.
People may think dresses are a good example, but they really aren’t. What dresses actually use that much fabric?
If you search back the threads, you’ll find references to a pre-war syndicated newspaper column filler, where the joke was that seamstress used the whole nine yards to create a shirt (on instruction from his buddy – we all need friends like that). Not an extravagant shirt – just a lot of shirt.
That bit of press appeared in a lot of newspapers. The problem was that there wasn’t a connection from that, to the later use of the phrase, by 20 years or more. I think that’s still the case – all the earliest uses of the phrase are isolated and unconnected, with no apparent idiomatic meaning.
I think a part of it is the “ChatGPT” approach. It no longer has to be accurate to pass as fact-it just has to be presented as fact to pass as fact.
When I was making money as a kid, I mowed the whole nine yards.
Ironically, Chat GPT actually gives the right answer of “it’s murky/nobody knows” to this question and lists the likeliest theories and why they’re suspect.
Very few nowadays, but it was a far from uncommon quantity for garments in the 19th-century and early 20th-century contexts where the phrase is apparently first attested.
For Victorian and Civil War-era gowns that had to fit over wide petticoats and/or hoop skirts, and included gathers, pleats, ruffles, flounces and/or overskirts, 8-10 yards of fabric is a very standard amount.
(A useful “How Much Yardage Do I Need?” post with fabric quantity estimates on the HistoricalSewing dotcom blog.)
I’m not seeing it. It means 100%. You can say you gave it 110% but you can’t mean it. You don’t brag about irrationally using up all your resources when less will do. The phrase can’t be used to distinguish between using ‘the whole 9 yards’ because it’s all you have and the using ‘the whole 9 yards’ because you were over jubilant in your purpose.
Do you have a cite for that? Because, some while ago, I read that the first substantive attestation that can be found is from the mid-to-late 1950s, in which an athlete made a 27’ jump and it was decribed as the whole 9 yards. Of course, to me, that usage sounds a lot like a play on a common expression, so the claim that that was the coinage seems incredibly shaky.
From the OED, two cites from 1907 and 1908:
(1907) 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. [Mitchell (Indiana) Commerc.]
(1908) Roscoe went fishing and has a big story to tell… He will catch some unsuspecting individual some of these days and give him the whole nine yards. [Mitchell (Indiana) Commerc.]
And related, cites for “the whole six yards” from 1912 and 1921:
…in the sports section of the Spartanburg (South Carolina) Herald-Journal of May 7, 1921, an article about a baseball game between the Spartanburg Spartans and the Greenville Spinners. With it was a more detailed, at-bat-by-at-bat description of the same game. The headline of the detailed account? “The Whole Six Yards of It.”
That headline appears to use “the whole six yards” in exactly the same sense as we now use “the whole nine yards.” I found confirmation via the database Chronicling America. An article in the Mount Vernon (Kentucky) Signal of May 17, 1912, states: “But there is one thing sure, we dems would never have known that there was such crookedness in the Rebublican [sic] party if Ted and Taft had not got crossed at each other. Just wait boys until the fix gets to a fever heat and they will tell the whole six yards.” And again, in the June 28, 1912, issue: “As we have been gone for a few days and failed to get all the news for this issue we will give you the whole six yards in our next.”
And there you have it, folks-it was just a simple case of inflation.
As a side note, what a blast from the past that mention of Silver John happens to be. We lived not that far from the author, many years back, and had several of his books; I believe he was at one of the local SF conventions and we got them signed.
If it went from nine yards in 1907 and 1908 to six yards in 1912 and 1921, sounds more like deflation to me.
It was cold outside?
This is a lot, I know, but we haven’t done this in a while, so – for “the whole nine yards”-obsessed – I thought it might be helpful to list the so-far earliest known idiomatic uses of “the whole nine yards” (W9Y) and “the whole six yards” (W6Y). I’ve thrown in a “whole ten yards” (W10Y), too, because it’s used in the same way, though it’s hard to know whether someone just goofed on the number or whether this was a true variant. I’ve also tacked on two possible predecessors/variants that may be of interest. (Hard to know what that “whole three yards” is all about, but there you go.)
In the end, notice how nonchalantly these writers use the expression, without feeling the need to offset the phrase with quotation marks, indicating an expectation that their readers were already well familiar with the folksy saying. Note, too, the geographical extent of the idiom by 1930 and a seeming hotspot around Indiana and Kentucky ca. 1915.
1907 (W9Y; south central IN): Full nine yards, 5/2/1907 - Newspapers.com™
1908 (W9Y; north central KY): whole nine yards, 5/15/08 - Newspapers.com™
1908 (W9Y; south central IN): The whole nine yards, June 4, 1908, The Mitchell Commercial, Mitchell, IN - Newspapers.com™
1912 (W6Y; SE KY): whole six yards, 5/17/1912 - Newspapers.com™
1912 (W6Y; SE KY): whole six yards, 6/28/1912 - Newspapers.com™
1912 (W9Y; south central IN): whole nine yards, 10/10/1912 - Newspapers.com™
1914 (W9Y; north central KY): whole nine yards, 3/27/14 - Newspapers.com™
1914 (W9Y; south central IN): whole nine yards, 11/26/1914 - Newspapers.com™
1916 (W6Y; north central KY): whole six yards, 4/13/16 - Newspapers.com™
1917 (W6Y; north central AR): whole six yards, 3/23/1917 - Newspapers.com™
1921 (W6Y; NW SC): The whole nine yards - Wikipedia
1922 (W6Y; north central GA; beginning of second column): The News-herald. (Lawrenceville, Ga.) 1898-1965, March 30, 1922, Image 1 « Georgia Historic Newspapers
1922 (W9Y; north central KY): whole nine yards (typo, whos), 9/29/22 - Newspapers.com™
1923 (W9Y; north central KY): whole nine yards, 6/1/23 - Newspapers.com™
1927 (W6Y; south central MO): whole six yards, 12/15/1927 - Newspapers.com™
1930 (W10Y; north central OK): "The whole ten yards" - Newspapers.com™
Possible prototypes/variants:
1850 (“nine yards,” two uses; E MO): "Your last 'nine yards'" (possibly prototype), 12/4/1850 (another exx. in text) - Newspapers.com™
1882 (W3Y; central NC): Orange County Observer, Hillsborough, NC, 4 November 1882, p. 2 - Newspapers.com™
Thanks for compiling these.
It’s interesting that the 1850 hit you cite as a possible prototype does indeed have quotes around “nine yards:” “Sir, your last ‘nine yards’ would have been unworthy of notice…” The sentence is from a “Third Epistle to Edwin,” part of a back and forth lengthy letter battle that had been going on since September, for those who don’t have a newspapers.com subscription. The writer was W. W. Wallace. The tone contains invective in both flowery learned allusions and basic slang, so “nine yards” could have been known slang not usually found in newspapers.
As I’m sure you have, I’ve done very basic searches for “seven yards” and “eight yards” and “ten yards” through that time period without finding anything. That says to me that presumably “six” and “nine” are making some allusion themselves or else just moving up the number line would boost the extravagance of the image. Any thoughts on this?