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The Whole Nine Yards
Refers to a nine-yard belt of bullets fired from a gun on the flying fortresses in WWII. if they shot you full of holes and ran out of bullets you got "the whole nine yards"
Emails from site visitors :
Email: I was reading on your IdiomSite and I didn't see the expression, "the whole
nine yards". This I believe originated around WWII when the amount of
belted ammunition loaded into fighter aircraft measured out to the length of
nine yards. When a pilot returned from his mission with no ammo left, the
mechanics would ask how they (the pilots) did on their mission and the reply
was ," I gave them the whole nine yards." The terms is still used today
where it is used in the context to mean, putting forth the maximum effort or
it's used to mean getting every part, piece, or completing every single task
asked of you. If asked if you got everything you need to go camping for
example, you would say, "Everything, the whole nine yards." I hope this
helps. Great site!
Email: It’s odd how many different supposed origins this simple phrase has. I’ve heard that it’s supposedly a nautical term referring to old boats with masts. A ‘yardarm’ (shortened to ‘yard’) was a horizontal spar attached to the masts that held the square sails. Large ships had three masts, with three yardarms on each, so to talk about the whole ship, you could refer to it as the “whole nine yards”. Thanks.
Email: A concrete truck can hold much more than nine cubic yards. You may want to remove that statement from the posting. The other comment concerning the "Great Kilt", or breachan feileadh as it was origionally called, is quite true, and historically documentable back to the 16th century.
Email: The whole nine yards: Just a comment about your reader's suggestions regarding this phrase. Since the "standard" cement truck of the mid sixties, when the phrase came into popular use, had a 4.5 yard capacity, that explanation is very unlikely.
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