"the whole nine yards" meaning in All languages combined

See the whole nine yards on Wiktionary

Adverb [English]

Etymology: Dave Wilton summarises the findings of Bonnie Taylor-Blake and others: :The phrase doesn’t have one particular origin, nor does it represent one particular metaphor. Instead, it seems to have evolved from a sense of yard meaning a vague quantity of something. Later, the words full or whole were attached to it, and even later it was quantified by the numbers six and nine, with the whole nine yards eventually winning out and becoming the canonical form. Use of the full phrase was for a long time restricted to the American Midwest, in particular to the region around the Kentucky-Indiana border, before breaking out into general American parlance in the middle of the twentieth century. … :So regardless of what someone else has told you, the whole nine yards does not refer to the length of a belt of WWII machine-gun ammunition, the amount of material needed to make a Scottish kilt or a sari, the number of spars on a sailing ship, the amount of concrete a cement mixer holds, or anything else. Etymology templates: {{m|en|yard}} yard, {{m|en|full}} full, {{m|en|whole}} whole, {{m|en|six}} six, {{m|en|nine}} nine, {{m|en|the whole nine yards}} the whole nine yards Head templates: {{head|en|adverb|head=the whole nine yards}} the whole nine yards
  1. All the way; with everything done completely or thoroughly. Categories (topical): Nine
    Sense id: en-the_whole_nine_yards-en-adv-GA~yXFMa Disambiguation of Nine: 60 40 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with language name categories using raw markup, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English positive polarity items, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 68 32 Disambiguation of English entries with language name categories using raw markup: 65 35 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 63 37 Disambiguation of English positive polarity items: 71 29 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 66 34

Noun [English]

Etymology: Dave Wilton summarises the findings of Bonnie Taylor-Blake and others: :The phrase doesn’t have one particular origin, nor does it represent one particular metaphor. Instead, it seems to have evolved from a sense of yard meaning a vague quantity of something. Later, the words full or whole were attached to it, and even later it was quantified by the numbers six and nine, with the whole nine yards eventually winning out and becoming the canonical form. Use of the full phrase was for a long time restricted to the American Midwest, in particular to the region around the Kentucky-Indiana border, before breaking out into general American parlance in the middle of the twentieth century. … :So regardless of what someone else has told you, the whole nine yards does not refer to the length of a belt of WWII machine-gun ammunition, the amount of material needed to make a Scottish kilt or a sari, the number of spars on a sailing ship, the amount of concrete a cement mixer holds, or anything else. Etymology templates: {{m|en|yard}} yard, {{m|en|full}} full, {{m|en|whole}} whole, {{m|en|six}} six, {{m|en|nine}} nine, {{m|en|the whole nine yards}} the whole nine yards Head templates: {{head|en|noun|head=the whole nine yards}} the whole nine yards
  1. (And) everything; often used, like etc., to finish out a list. Synonyms: everything Translations ((And) everything): hottentottententententoonstelling [feminine] (Dutch), koko hoito (Finnish), koko potti (Finnish), helahoito (Finnish), das volle Programm (German), minden (Hungarian), y toda la pesca (Spanish)
    Sense id: en-the_whole_nine_yards-en-noun-fNG7z5ny

Download JSON data for the whole nine yards meaning in All languages combined (7.7kB)

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      "word": "hottentottententententoonstelling"
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      "word": "koko potti"
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      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "(And) everything",
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      "sense": "(And) everything",
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      "sense": "(And) everything",
      "word": "minden"
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      "sense": "(And) everything",
      "word": "y toda la pesca"
    }
  ],
  "wikipedia": [
    "the whole nine yards"
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}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-22 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (fc4f0c7 and c937495). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.