cloud nine
- 1A state of great happiness or elation, often in the phrase on cloud nine.
After the team clinched the championship, the whole town seemed to be on cloud nine.
The new parents drove home from the hospital on cloud nine, hardly noticing the traffic.
Note
Nobody knows for certain why the happy cloud is number nine. One suggested answer is the first International Cloud Atlas of 1896, which set out ten types of cloud and placed the towering cumulonimbus ninth. The phrase usually travels with on, as in he was on cloud nine for days, and the fuller on cloud number nine also turns up.
- 2A state of fanciful or impractical thinking or dreaming, as in phrases like living on cloud nine.
Anyone who expects the budget to balance itself without cuts is living on cloud nine.
Much of the report lives up on cloud nine, proposing rail lines the region could never afford.
Note
Here the cloud is a put-down rather than a delight: it marks plans, systems and theories as out of touch with what can be done. It keeps company with living and up (living on cloud nine, lives up on cloud nine), and Basil Arthur turned it on members in a 1981 parliamentary debate. Some may count it nonstandard, and since the joyful meaning shares the phrase, let the context make the criticism plain.
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Origin
The origin of the sense 'a state of bliss' is uncertain, but it has been suggested that it comes from the first edition of the International Cloud Atlas (1896), which defined ten types of cloud and described the ninth, the cumulonimbus, as rising to 10 km (6.2 miles), the highest a cloud can be. The related expression 'cloud seven' may have come from confusing 'cloud nine' with 'seventh heaven'. The sense 'a state of fantastic or impractical dreaming or thinking' may come from confusing the first sense with the phrase 'head in the clouds'.