I was talking to a friend who had attended an event at the Community Club in Shepherdstown recently and she said it was very nice and much more formal than most are around here. She said that everyone was dressed to the nines.
I’ve heard that expression fairly often over the years, and I always wondered, nine what? I guess I’ve always known that “dressed to the nines” is a way of saying that a person is really “dressed up” or dressed to perfection and really looks nice. But what does “nine” have to do with being nicely dressed?
Well, my extensive research turned up the fact that people were using the phrase “to the nines” maybe a hundred years before it became associated with clothes or the way we dressed. So where did it originate? Even my extensive research failed to come up with a clear answer. I found a lot of different answers and partial answers. A couple of sources said that the phrase “dressed to the nines,” meaning “dressed in a highly elaborate or showy manner,” is a specific application of the Scottish phrase ”to the nine(s).” Well, ok, but what does that mean? Everyone seems to agree that the phrase wasn’t originally associated with one’s dress.
In a letter written by William Hamilton on July 24, 1719, he wrote: “The bonny Lines therein thou sent me. How to the nines they did content me.” Supposedly, its meaning is “to perfection — just right.” Try as I might, I couldn’t find a definitive explanation of the nine in “to the nine(s).””Dressed to the nines” started to be used in the 19th century. A lot of ideas have surfaced linking clothing with the number nine. One idea says that the phrase comes from the nine yards of material a tailor needs to make a really nice suit. But most tailors agree that four to five yards of fabric should be enough for a three-piece suit.
Another story of its origin says the phrase refers to the 99th Regiment of Foot, a British army regiment established in 1842 that was known for the immaculate condition of their uniforms.
Another theory is that the phrase descends from the Old English saying “dressed to the eyes,” which because Old English was weird, was written as “dressed to then eyne.” The thought is that someone at some point heard “then eyne” and mistook it for “the nine” or “the nines.”
But nonetheless, the simpler phrases “to the nine” and “to the nines” were already used to mean “to perfection” for maybe a hundred years before “dressed to the nines” came along.
Just how the number nine came to be a part of the phrase certainly isn’t clear and doesn’t seem to have been specific to clothing.
Why nine…. it could still be a misheard “then eyne” and refer to the eyes. It might also refer to some group of nine. Nine pops up in myths and history all over the world. In Norse cosmology, the great tree Yggdrasil unites nine worlds. The ancient Greeks had nine muses. In Christianity, there are nine spiritual gifts of the Holy Spirit. In Europe during the Middle Ages, the Nine Worthies were men drawn from pagan, Jewish and Christian history as personifications of chivalry. Maybe the “nines” we use when talking about snappy dressers is referring to one of those groups — or something else.
But — after all my extensive research, I decided maybe all these theories were wrong….. maybe they were referring to being “dressed from head to toe” — the nines are the ears — roughly shaped like the number nine….
So I don’t think anyone really knows the answer to “why nine?” But I’m pretty sure it’s always a compliment.
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