To be on cloud nine, or cloud 9, is to be in a state of perfect happiness. The expression is American, first recorded in 1935 as cloud eight, and the popular US Weather Bureau explanation does not stand up. Nine only became the settled number later, after cloud seven had been the favourite.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘On cloud nine’?
Whenever a phrase includes a number, like the whole nine yards, at sixes and sevens etc., then attempts to find its derivation usually focus on the significance of the number. ‘On cloud nine’ is no exception.
A commonly heard explanation is that the expression originated as one of the classifications of cloud which were defined by the US Weather Bureau in the 1950s, in which ‘Cloud Nine’ denotes the fluffy cumulonimbus type that are considered so attractive.
Another explanation is that the phrase derives from Buddhism and that Cloud Nine is one of the stages of the progress to enlightenment of a Bodhisattva (one destined to become a Buddha).
Neither of these explanations holds water. To begin with, both the cloud classifications and the Buddhist stages to enlightenment have ten levels.
To single out the last but one stage of either is rather like attributing the source of the ‘whole nine yards’ to American Football, where it is ten yards rather than nine that is a significant measure. Also, the fact that nine is far from the only number that has been linked with clouds, argues against those origins. Early examples of ‘cloud’ expressions include clouds seven, eight, nine and even thirty-nine.
The two reference works that carry the cloud-classification story do not tell it the same way, which is itself a reason for caution. Green’s Dictionary of Slang traces it to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 15th edition, 1995, where the scheme is credited to the US Weather Bureau and has “nine divisions, and number nine is cumulonimbus”. The Online Etymology Dictionary points instead to the 1895 International Cloud-Atlas, “long the basic source for cloud shapes, in which, of the ten cloud types, cloud No. 9, cumulonimbus, was the biggest, puffiest, most comfortable-looking”. Etymonline dates ‘cloud nine’ itself to 1950 and leaves the question open, describing the phrase as “American English, of uncertain origin or significance”.
It seems that it is the clouds themselves, rather than the number of them, that were in the thoughts of those who coined this phrase. The imagery was originally of a ‘cloud cuckoo land’ or ‘head in the clouds’ dreaminess, induced by either intoxication or inspiration, rather than the ‘idyllic happiness’ that we now associate with the phrase. The early references all come from mid 20th century USA and the earliest that I’ve found is in Albin Pollock’s directory of slang, The Underworld Speaks, 1935:
“Cloud eight, befuddled on account of drinking too much liquor.”
‘Cloud nine’ comes a little later, for example, in The Oxnard Press-Courier, August 1946:
“I think he has thought of everything, unless the authorities pull something new on him out of cloud nine.”
Around the same period we find clouds seven and thirty-nine, in The San Mateo Times, April 1952 and Ross’s Hustlers, 1956, respectively:
“Mantovani’s skilled use of reeds and strings puts this disc way up on Cloud Seven.”
“That stuff is way up on Cloud Thirty-nine.”
The early favourite was ‘cloud seven’ and many of the oldest citations use that form, as in this piece from The Dictionary of American Slang, 1960, which was the first printed definition of the term
“Cloud seven - completely happy, perfectly satisfied; in a euphoric state.”
This early preference for seven as the significant number may have been influenced by the existing phrase ‘seventh heaven’.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang gathers all of these numbered forms under a single entry and opens it with the same 1935 line from Pollock, so the starting date is not in dispute. The numeral spelling that people often use today, cloud 9, turns up in Green’s a generation before the George Harrison and Temptations albums, in a lyric from the 1959 song ‘Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb’: “Don’t cut out of here till we get on Cloud 9.”
Since the 1980s or so, ‘cloud nine’ has become predominant. That has probably been influenced by the use of ‘cloud nine’ in popular music - George Harrison adopted the term as the title of his 1987 album and, more notably, The Temptations’ ‘psychedelic soul’ album of the same name, in 1969.
Linguistic hype being what it is, we now hear people expressing their happiness with the inflationary ‘cloud ten’, which brings us back to the cumulonimbus/Buddhist theories. Eighth heaven anyone?
The drink has dropped out of the phrase along the way. The Cambridge Dictionary now defines ‘be on cloud nine’ as “to be extremely happy and excited”, which is a long way from the befuddlement of Pollock’s 1935 cloud eight.
See other phrases that were coined in the USA.