From Whence Cometh the Foot?

Nobody is quite sure where the term ‘The whole nine yards’ comes from.

I have said that it is a Naval term based on the idea that a sailing ship with three masts has three ‘yards’ (spars) per mast. Ships could change direction as the new sails were unfurled; it is only when the last sail is unfurled that the enemy might know what direction the ship will finally be taking. The ship will now be sailing under the ‘whole nine yards’.

Some people have said that it refers to the shipyards rather than the sails.

There is little recorded use of this phrase before the 1950’s so there could be some truth in the idea that it is from the cutting table of a tailor’s shop. A suit is said to made from nine yards of material and so a tailor making a suit could be said to be using the ‘whole nine yards’. People who like this theory will point out that there is a similar saying, ‘dressed to the nines’, that is used to describe people who are well dressed—perhaps ‘overdressed’?

Another theory is that Ralph Boston was the first long –jumper to leap twenty-seven feet (twenty-seven feet and half an inch). You would think that headline writers might have equally jumped at the opportunity to write, “Boston Goes the Whole Nine Yards”. But they did not. That was in May, 1969.

Ralph Boston

I’m going to stick with my theory until proven otherwise! (How arrogant is that?)

But what is a ‘yard’?

This breaks into two different ideas. One of which is the idea of a ‘yard’ as being an enclosed area of land. This comes from the verb ‘to gird’; this is from the same root as ‘garden’ (note the German word ‘garten’ is similar). In Russian the word ‘gorod’ (town) originally meant an enclosed, or fortified, town. Similarly, the Latin or Greek ‘hortus’ and ‘hortos’ (farm-yard, feeding place, fodder – hay was always grown in an enclosed area) give us the same root.

Nowadays the area may be enclosed or open.

We should have a quick look at some other words used as measurement and see where they came from.

An ‘inch’ is the width of your thumb. Or it was. It is now, legally, 2.54 cms. That makes the inch based on metric measurements. How sad.

The Romans had a ‘pes’ which was made up of twelve ‘unciae’. ‘Pes’ is ‘foot’ (‘pedes’ is ‘feet’). England has used the ‘foot’ as a unit of measurement for over a thousand years but it was always, like so many other units, variable. This was until 1876 when it was decreed that the yard, foot and inch would be standardised. There is a plaque in Trafalgar Square, London that tells you this and shows the, new, standard measurements at 62°F.

Plaque in Trafalgar Square

(A 'Chain' is also marked out)

A ‘light-foot’ as part of a ‘light-year’ is about one light-nanosecond or billionth of a second, or 1/1,000,000,000 secs.

[Beware something called a metric foot often used by DIY stores. It is 30 centimetres long, which is less than a foot, and you don't get a whole number of them to a metre. This makes it useless for both imperial and metric measurement.]

A yard is a single stride. The word yard comes from the Old English ‘gyrd’, meaning a rod or measure. Henry I (1100-1135) decreed that the lawful yard be the distance between the tip of his nose and the end of his thumb. It was within a tenth of an inch of the modern yard. A yard is nearly a metre.

A mile is derived from ‘mille’, Latin for thousand, since a Roman mile was ‘mille passuum’, a thousand Roman paces or double strides, from left foot to left foot. A ‘passus’ was 5 ‘pedes’, which would make 5000 feet to the mile.

The modern mile is 5280 feet or 1760 yards. In the past every part of England had its own mile, up to 2880 yards. In Ireland, the mile was 2240 yards well into the 20^th century.

A furlong is a 'furrow long' or length of a medieval field. This varied widely because the horses were entitled to pause for rest at the end of each furrow. Heavy soils meant a shorter rest or a shorter furrow. The railways insisted on a standard length for a furlong so it came to be one eighth of a mile.

"The whole of the United States was measured and mapped using the Gunter’s Chain and his chain still applies to all title plans in use today. For this reason all city blocks, roads and avenues are multiples of the chain. Towns were laid out at 6 miles square or 36 sq miles. Early farms were sold to would-be farmers as lots of 640 acres or 1 sq mile. Interestingly enough the geodetic coastal survey and ordnance surveys of the entire US are metric."

A chain is the length of a cricket pitch. It has been in use since 1620. The correct name is a Gunter’s Chain after the Reverend Edmund Gunter who was a Professor of Astronomy.

[The Ramsden's chain or engineer's chain is 100 feet long, where each link is one foot long.]

100 links make one chain. A link is 7.92 inches (7.92”).

Rods, poles and perches are different names for the same unit. Medieval ploughing was done with oxen, up to 4 pairs at a time. The ploughman handled the plough. His boy controlled the oxen using a stick, which had to be long enough to reach all the oxen. This was the rod, pole or perch.

     A BBC web-page about allotments says, "an allotment plot is 10 poles" and claims that "A pole is measured as the length from the back of the plough to the nose of the ox". If you wanted to control the front ox, you needed a pole long enough to reach!

The perch was used in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), the pole since the 16C, and the rod since 1450.

A span, sometimes known as an ‘octave’ for the keys on a piano, was originally the length from your little finger to your thumb if you stretch your fingers out. It later became 9 inches or a quarter of a yard.

The cubit is the earliest unit of length, used in Egypt in the 3rd Dynasty (2800-2300 BC). It is the length of the arm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. The English cubit is 18 inches long, but the Romans, Egyptians and Hebrews all had different lengths. Cubits are used in the Bible. Noah’s Ark is said to have been 300 cubits long.

A cloth-yard was used to measure cloth. It is an inch longer than an ordinary yard. A natural way to measure cloth is to hold one end in one hand, and measure along the edge to the nose, then repeat, and these would be cloth-yards. A cloth-yard shaft was an arrow a cloth-yard long because that is how far you can draw a bow.

An ell is derived from 'elbow'. It started off similar to the cubit, but the English ell was 45 inches or a yard and a quarter. It could have been measured from elbow to elbow. There was an old saying "Give him an inch and he'll take an ell". As the ell fell out of common use, the saying got changed to "Give him an inch and he'll take a mile" (which makes less sense).

Another cloth measure. Cloth is stored in rolls, which are still called ‘bolts’.

Cloth Bolts

A league is another measure that varies by country. In England, it is taken to be 3 miles. It was originally the distance that you could walk in an hour.

In fairy tales, there were seven league boots, which would carry you seven leagues (21 miles) in one stride. Jules Verne wrote a book about a submarine, called "20,000 Leagues under the Sea". This refers to how far they travelled, not how deep they were. 

3 barleycorns = 1 inch. This was used in Tudor times. Thus 4 poppy seeds = 1 barleycorn and 12 poppy seeds = 1 inch.

In Asia, by the way, there is a Saga Tree. Also known as a ‘Shade Tree’. The seeds from this tree are always exactly the same size and weight. They were used, many years ago, as a standard to weigh valuable items—like jewels and gold.

 Saga Tree Seeds

As a last thought: if you have finished reading this and the sun is now over the yardarm, you may take a drink.

(Royal Navy, early 19^th Century.)