13 July 2020
A Dixie Dugan comic strip from 6 June 1946 using the phrase on cloud 9
To be on cloud nine is to be in euphoric state. Many people speculate on the origin of the phrase, wondering what the significance of the number nine might be, but the origin and underlying metaphor is rather straightforward, and the use of the number nine is arbitrary. The nine really doesn’t stand for anything (cf. the whole nine yards). The phrase as we know it is relatively recent, appearing in 1930s American slang, but it has predecessors going back the seventeenth century.
In the seventeenth century, the phrase in the clouds could be used to refer to things that were either unknown or mystical, that is things known only to God in the heavens. For example, Nathaniel Bacon, writing in 1651 about the reign of Henry IV (1399–1413):
However, for the present the House of Lancaster hath the Crown intailed, and the Inheritance is left in the Clouds to be revealed in due time.
And by the nineteenth century, to have one’s head in the clouds is to be unconcerned with practical, down-to-earth matters, a phrase that is still very much in use. From Maria Edgeworth’s 1806 novel Leonora:
What the devil would you have of your wife, my dear L——? You would be loved above all earthly considerations; honour, duty, virtue, and religion inclusive, would you? and you would have a wife with her head in the clouds, would you? I wish you were married to one of the all-for-love heroines, who would treat you with bowl and dagger every day of your life.
The addition of a number to the cloud occurs in American slang in the 1930s and was likely influenced by or a play on seventh heaven. Albin Pollock’s 1935 glossary of criminal slang, The Underworld Speaks, records:
Cloud eight, befuddled on account of drinking too much liquor.
And two years later, on 15 August 1937, sportswriter Harry Borba subtracts one and connects the resulting on cloud seven with the older sense of being left to fate or the gods:
But the subject of harangue—and we’re sure they argue up there on cloud seven—is not about the futility of war to end all wars. It is about that unending warfare between universities and college football.
On 12 November 1944, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper uses on cloud eight to refer to the divinity that is Greta Garbo when relaying a tale about the actress during the filming of the 1927 silent movie Love, an adaptation of Anna Karenina:
Within a few minutes Goulding was at work on her hair, with his mouth full of hairpins. That did it. By that simple device Garbo, momentarily stunned, got off her perch somewhere on cloud eight and became one of the people.
Finally, on 6 June 1946 the comic strip Dixie Dugan uses on cloud nine to describe a lovestruck woman:
Wow—Is she on cloud 9—Maybe he is worth waiting for.
The following year, a storyline in the Dixie Dugan comic featured an airplane named Cloud 9.
And in 1951, jazz singer Julia Lee, famous for her edgy and risqué lyrics, recorded the song “Pipe Dreams (Up on Cloud Nine)” about an opium high. The phrase doesn’t appear in the song itself, only in the title. (At least, it isn’t in the recorded version I have heard.)
And on 25 March 1952 a syndicated description of the NCAA basketball tournament appearing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and other papers, uses on cloud nine to describe a team’s hopes for victory:
Clyde Lovellette, the cloud scraping Kansan with 27 nicknames, is the terror of the NCAA basketball tournament before he has even lifted a finger.
“After we won the western regional in Corvallie, Ore.,” said Coach Bobby Feerick of Santa Clara today, “we were on cloud nine. We came down fast when we saw Lovellette there.”
At about this time, nine becomes cemented as the canonical number in the phrase and uses of cloud seven and cloud eight fade away. So, it seems that the number nine has no actual significance. Perhaps the fact that nine has mystical connotations in some numerological systems helped it beat out the competition from seven or eight, but any such connection doesn’t seem to factor into the phrase’s meaning.
Some have contended that in the 1930s the U.S. Weather Bureau promulgated a nine-tiered system of cloud classification, but I have been unable to find any such classification scheme. In 1910 the International Meteorological Committee met in Paris and put forward definitions for ten different cloud types, and these were republished by the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1928, but the ten definitions can be combined into a larger number of cloud types. And the phrases cloud one, cloud two, cloud three, etc. are not used. Currently, the U.S. National Weather Service classifies clouds into thirty-two types. While it is within the realm of possibilities that the meteorological schema influenced the phrase, there is no reason to think that it did.
Sources:
Bacon, Nathaniel. The Continuation of An Historicall Discourse of the Government of England. London: Thomas Roycroft for Matthew Walbanck and Henry Twyford, 1651, 128. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Borba, Harry. “Borba-Rometer.” San Francisco Examiner, 15 August 1937, SF5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“Capital Buyer’s Guide” (advertisement). Billboard, 27 January 1951, 19.
Edgeworth, Maria. Leonora, vol. 2. London: Joseph Johnson, 1806, 24.
“Giant Kansas Cager Feared by NCAA Foes.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 25 March 1952, 14. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. cloud nine n.
Hopper, Hedda. “Thar’s Gold in That Thar Goulding.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 November 1944, D2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
McEvoy, J.P. and John H. Striebel. Dixie Dugan (comic strip). Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 6 June 1946, 12. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
———. Dixie Dugan (comic strip). Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 23 April 1947, 12. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“NOAA/NWS and NASA’s Sky Watcher Chart.” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Air and Space Administration. Accessed 13 May 2020. https://gewa.gsfc.nasa.gov/clubs/sailing/IMAGES/MISCELLANEOUS/CloudChart.pdf.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cloud, n.
———, third edition, June 2013, s.v., head, n.1.
Pollock, Albin J. The Underworld Speaks. San Francisco: Prevent Crime Bureau, 1935.
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Weather Bureau. Cloud Forms According to the International System of Classification. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1928. HathiTrust Digital Archive.