![]() ‘Twas kerried.”Īnd by 5 February 1888 the Boston Globe was reporting: “I motioned we shove the hul kit an boodle of the gamblers ashore on logs. The combined form appears by at least 1861, when the following is recorded in Theodore Winthrop’s John Brent: “It is no use to be a “Son,” it’s no use to be a whig, it’s no use to be nothin’,-I’ll cut the whole caboodle.” The form caboodle appears as early as 1848 in this citation from the Wisconsin Democrat, 16 December of that year from a Whig candidate who lost a supposedly safe seat in an election: ![]() The Journal of American Folklore records this usage from 1827: “Elisabeth had the Boedel of Jan Verbeck, desceased, in hands.”īy the early 19th century, boodle was being used in the phrase the whole boodle to signify everything, the entire collection of something. The term in the original Dutch sense was introduced into American English as early as 1699 as this citation from that year in Lederer’s Colonial American English attests: It comes from the Dutch boedel, meaning estate, inheritance, or possessions. take all.”Ĭaboodle is a variant of boodle, which means a number of items or people. “The kit is likewise the whole of a soldier’s necessities, the contents of his knapsack: and is used also to express the whole of different commodities as, Here, take the whole kit, i.e. The earliest known use to mean a collection of items is from 1785 in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which glosses kit as: “Thai strak his hed of, and syne it Thai haf gert salt in-till a kyt And send it in-till Ingland.” It appears in English as early as 1375 in Barbour’s The Bruce: This original sense of kit remained current in English at least through the 19th century. The word kit is from the Middle Dutch kitte, a wooden vessel made of hooped staves. Kit doesn’t seem to make much sense here and what the heck is a caboodle? But it’s an odd-sounding phrase to the modern ear. Kit and caboodle is everything, the entire of collection of things under consideration. The whole kit and caboodle ~ the entire thing. “The whole kit and boodle” appears in print by at least 1849. “Caboodle” or “boodle” is an old Dutch word meaning possessions. “Kit” is an old Dutch word meaning a wooden vessel made of hoop staves. In the 1800s, the phrase was variously given as “the whole kit” or “the whole caboodle” or “the whole kit and biling” or “the whole kit and boodle,” among many other variations. "The whole kit and caboodle” is an older expression for what we might nowadays say is “the whole nine yards”-that is, “everything.”
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