Where did the saying “The whole 9 yards” come from?
I’ll go over some of the more common suggestions, but first let’s consider some important background material. The phrase is first found, to my knowledge, in 1966. (An unreliable book has claimed that it dates from the 1950s, which is itself not that implausible.) The early examples do not seem to be associated with a particular field; for example, it is found in military sources, but it doesn’t seem to be a specifically military expression. The phrase is an Americanism. A reasonable etymological theory must meet several criteria. It must be internally true–you cannot claim that the whole nine yards comes from the fact that a man’s three-piece suit require nine square yards of cloth if such a suit only requires five square yards. It must jibe with the evidence we have–an origin in some colonial practice is not likely to be the origin of a term first found in the 1960s. It must be sociolinguistically plausible–an origin in the jargon of cement-truck operators is unlikely because ther
