The Whole Nine Yards, but of What?
The whole nine yards is one of those mysterious expressions that seem to encourage creative etymologies. Search for the phrase online and you'll uncover a dozen or more ingenious "explanations" of where it came from. None of them are supported by evidence and most of them are demonstrably wrong.
All word researchers know for sure is that the earliest examples in print are connected with the Vietnam War. Elaine Shepard's 1967 novel about soldiers serving in Vietnam, The Doom Pussy, uses some version of the phrase several times, including in this reference to a Danang barber: "Most Americans enjoyed getting the full nine yards that is included in the French barber's repertoire." The military newspaper Pacific Stars and Stripes for November 13, 1967 also includes an example of the phrase: "Ann-Margaret . . . she dances, sings, acts—the whole nine yards." By 1969 the whole nine yards had made it back to the States. A real estate ad from Fort Walton Beach, Florida's Playground Daily News for April 28, 1969 claims, "This home has 'the whole nine yards' in convenience." The newspaper's use of quotation marks around the phrase indicates that it was new enough to be considered marginal.
Many people think of football when they hear this expression. It doesn't really fit though. Football players must run ten yards for a first down, not nine. It has been suggested that the use of nine is ironic—if a player only ran nine yards he didn't go quite far enough to make a difference. However, the first uses of the expression were not ironic. Also, sports writers were not among the first to use it.
Most popular theories peg the expression to some item that measures nine yards. The list includes, although it is by no means limited to, the number of yards on World War II machine-gun ammunition belts; the volume of cement that a cement mixer holds; the amount of cloth required to make a suit, a kilt, or a shroud; the amount of cloth found on an uncut bolt; and, the number of yardarms on three-masted sailing ships. The convoluted explanations involved in deriving the whole nine yards from these starting points stand as a testament to the amazing ingenuity of word origins enthusiasts. Unfortunately, all have serious problems.
A number of etymologists have spent time tracking down one or more of the possible explanations. On February 14, 2002 Michael Quinion, author of the World Wide Words site, posted his findings about the length of machine-gun belts on the American Dialect Society's discussion list. According to the Imperial War Museum in Cambridgeshire, England, the belts for the Browning machine guns on display there are exactly twenty-seven feet—that is, nine yards—long. However subsequent postings by other people, as well as facts found elsewhere, indicate that this measurement is probably a coincidence. It turns out that ammunition belts can be any length; most of those used during World War II were much shorter than nine yards. Another argument against this explanation is that ammunition is never normally referred to in terms of belt length, but rather in number of rounds. Like most of the other explanations, this story also fails to account for why the whole nine yards first appeared in the 1960s among American soldiers in Vietnam, rather than in World War II England, where the Browning ammunition belts were used.