[Ads-l] Minor Questionable Square-Bracketed Antedating of "Whole Nine Yards"

[Stephen Goranson]

I agree that the true earliest known citations in the current sense were found by Bonnie Taylor-Blake.

Though I haven't looked into this lately, I recall that the shirt joke was reprinted several times in 1855.
But that (a) it is, for the origin of the later use, an irrelevant statement, and
(b) additionally, unlike some jokes, it was most probably unknown to a later generation, so this may be a case in which the last known use is as significant as the first known use.

Stephen


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From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, June 1, 2025 8:27 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Minor Questionable Square-Bracketed Antedating of "Whole Nine Yards"

I have an antedating of the OED's entry for "whole nine yards" that will not come as a surprise to Bonnie Taylor Blake or other people who have researched that expression, and that I do not even believe should be treated as an antedating.  But the OED has a square-bracketed first use (in the OED, square brackets indicate the citation is not strictly or not certainly an example of the headword), a humorous anecdote about quantity of cloth.  I do not agree that that anecdote is the source of the "whole nine yards" idiom, but I can help the OED by pointing out a slightly earlier appearance of the anecdote.

whole nine yards (OED, 30 Jan. 1855 square-bracketed first use)

1855 Spirit of the Age (Raleigh, N.C.) 3 Jan. 1/6 (Chronicling America)  I told him to get just enough to make three shirts; but instead of making three she has put the whole nine yards in to one shirt !

NOTE: In my opinion the true earliest known citations, found by Bonnie Taylor Blake, are dated 1907 ("full nine yards") and 1908 ("whole nine yards").

Fred Shapiro

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