Dressed to the nines

Posted by Gary Martin on July 01, 2009 at 07:40

In Reply to: Dressed to the nines posted by Keith on July 01, 2009 at 07:34:

: About the entry for "dressed to the nines": I note that Cervantes mentions "outfitting his donkey to the ninety-nines" in "Don Quixote", which seems to have been written before any of the other sources cited so it must have originated from further antiquity.

That's worth some further investigation, with a word of caution. Cervantes is given credit for various phrases which he didn't coin but which only appear in the later Victorian translations of Quixote into English.

• Dressed to the nines RRC 01/July/09