THE WHOLE NINE YARDS There are some queries that we answerers of
questions on the story of the English language get asked more
often than others. “What is the third word ending in gry?” has
come top of the list by a good margin. But “Where does the whole
nine yards come from?” runs it a close second. This has long
been one of the great unsolved mysteries of modern etymology,
though recent research work has brought us closer to a solution.
What we have known for many years is that the phrase dates from
after the Second World War, is American (it’s nothing like so
well known in Britain, for example), and has the meaning of
“everything; all of it; the whole lot; the works”. What is most
remarkable about the phrase is the number of attempts that have
been made to explain it. This may be because it’s an odd
expression. But perhaps our need to make sense of this saying in
particular is because it became widely known only during the
lifetime of many people still with us, and so lacks the patina
of age that turns phr