the whole nine yards
US/ðə ˌhoʊl ˌnaɪn ˈjɑɹdz/
the whole nine yards adverb: all the way; with everything done completely or thoroughly.
Adverb
the whole nine yards
- All the way; with everything done completely or thoroughly.
- Would they want me to vote my conscience or would they want us to unanimously go the whole nine yards, declare him sane and possibly have the trial end up in a death sentence?2007, Thomas Mchenry, Along the Rails: A Juror's Journey, page 85
- WWE went the whole nine yards, from making Tshirts with the slogan to having announcers mention his new handle approximately every four seconds anytime he was on-screen.2007, R. D. Reynolds, The Wrestlecrap Book of Lists!, page 18
Noun
the whole nine yards
- everything; often used, like etc., to finish out a list.
- While there Roscoe went fishing and has a big story to tell, but we refuse to stand while he unloads. He will catch some unsuspecting individual some of these days and give him the whole nine yards.1908 June 4, The Mitchell Commercial, Lawrence County, Indiana, retrieved 14 Aug 2018, page 3, col.5
- "I had a good job, a nice little house, the whole nine yards," she said.2002, Mary Losure, Our Way Or the Highway: Inside the Minnehaha Free State, page 161
- Synonyms:
- all the marbles, bag and baggage, everytang, everything but the galley stove, everything but the kitchen sink, everything under the sun, full monty, hook, line and sinker, kit and caboodle
Examples of the whole nine yards in a sentence
- Colleen had gone the whole nine yards, dressing up as a fortune teller, complete with huge gold earrings and a headscarf, which she'd plucked from her normal accessory box, she told Bronte.2012, Susan Stephens, Working with the Enemy, page 164:
- No, to her credit she kept right on going the whole time, telling me how she was from Mongolia, how she was an art student, how she was having an exhibition — the whole nine yards.2009, Jason Barbacovi, Me and Chairman Mao, page 101:
- Mario asked me to explain to him the whole nine yards so I decided to start off on a good note.2009, Reynaldo Laureano, Politics Vs. Prejudice in the Highway Patrol, page 46:
Synonyms of the whole nine yards
- all the marbles
- bag and baggage
- everytang
- everything but the galley stove
- everything but the kitchen sink
- everything under the sun
- full monty
- hook
- line and sinker
- kit and caboodle
13 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of the whole nine yards
| alternative form | the full nine yards |
|---|---|
| alternative form | the whole nine miles |
Origin of the whole nine yards
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.
Questions about the whole nine yards
- What does the whole nine yards mean?
- The whole nine yards means all the way; with everything done completely or thoroughly.
- How do you use the whole nine yards in a sentence?
- Colleen had gone the whole nine yards, dressing up as a fortune teller, complete with huge gold earrings and a headscarf, which she'd plucked from her normal accessory box, she told Bronte.
- What part of speech is the whole nine yards?
- The whole nine yards can be an adverb or a noun.
- How do you pronounce the whole nine yards?
- The whole nine yards is pronounced /ðə ˌhoʊl ˌnaɪn ˈjɑɹdz/ (US).
Words near the whole nine yards in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: the whole nine yards (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “the whole nine yards.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/the_whole_nine_yards. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.