The couple are on cloud nine after welcoming their first daughter on Saturday.Just one day after their wedding, Lisa was on cloud nine.Johnny is on cloud nine and hasn’t been this happy in months.Gavin is still on cloud nine after bagging the top prize in Berlin.“They’re on Cloud Nine, like any other newly engaged couple”.Tiew promises to wait for Mork at Chiang Mai where they first met. Examples of “On cloud nine” in a Sentence On Cloud Nine tells the story of love and relationship between Tiew and Mork. In fact, when the phrase first appeared, in America, during the 1930s, there are examples of people saying cloud seven or cloud eight-also mystical numbers by the way. Some people claim that cloud nine comes from a system for classifying clouds, in which nine was the highest classification, but this is not true. In any case, there are other English phrases with nines, having positive meaning- to go the whole nine yards, dressed to the nines there are nine Muses (goddesses of arts) and cats have nine lives. The number nine also has spiritual meaning in many traditions, perhaps because it is 3×3, and 3 is a magical number in most cultures. This experience has often been described as like walking on air or being in the clouds-to feel no weight, which is very comfortable, like soaking in a hot bath! Mysticism is the practice of experiencing the divine-God, Buddha, Brahma, Tao, etc.-through meditation. The phrase appears to have mystical origins. The earliest example with the ‘obscure’ meaning dates back to 1651, but look at this example from 1956: ‘Oh, she’s off on Cloud Seven – doesn’t even know we exist.’ This one clearly uses the Flavells’ dream-like meaning (as in another related phrase, ‘he’s got his head in the clouds’, meaning daydreaming).īut then look at this example from a 1960 dictionary of American slang: ‘ Cloud seven, on, completely happy, perfectly satisfied in a euphoric state.’ This brings us back to the meaning we set out to research.To be on cloud nine means to be very happy- blissful-such as when falling in love, or getting one’s dream job. The OED merges its entry for ‘on cloud seven or nine’ with that for ‘in the clouds’, meaning ‘obscure, mystical fanciful, unreal … (generally combining the notions of obscurity and elevation)’. This caught my eye because it ties in with some of the early examples given in the Oxford English Dictionary (if you have a UK library card, you may be able to log in to the OED online should you want to see more). The Flavells also acknowledge the US Weather Bureau theory and that the height of cumulonimbus is ‘an apt metaphor for being on top of the world, with hints of being in a dream-like, floating state’. There was also an American radio programme in the 1950s called Johnny Dollar, in which a character was frequently knocked unconscious and went to cloud nine, where he recovered (the Flavells credit this with fixing the number nine in the phrase, as does Albert Jack in Red Herrings and White Elephants). They suggest that it was popularised by jazz singers looking for a way of expressing a feeling of being ‘high’ (whether emotionally, as in the ‘happy’ meaning, or one caused by drink or drugs). They say that versions of the phrase first appeared in the 1930s (‘on cloud eight’) and referred to drunkenness.
Linda and Roger Flavell in their Dictionary of Idioms and their Origins say there’s ‘a good deal of uncertainty’ about the origin. She says it was the US Weather Bureau’s classification in the 20th century, and that each category of clouds was further subdivided into nine types of clouds – of which the ninth was the highest. Judy Parkinson in Spilling the Beans on the Cat’s Pyjamas gives more detail.
And apparently an older version of the saying was ‘on cloud seven’.
Very happy, as in: ‘I passed my exam – yippee! I’m on cloud nine!’ Where did it come from?Īpparently the phrase comes from an old system of classifying clouds.įrom the Horse’s Mouth, Oxford’s dictionary of idioms, says it was a 10-part classification so nine was very high.
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