For years, I would store it all beneath my bed or stockpiled in various makeup bags under my bathroom sink-no rhyme, no reason. To give you some context: As a beauty editor with privileged access to samples, I try to be as scrupulous as possible with what I hold onto, but inevitably end up with an excessive reserve of pencils, pigments, pots, and palettes I just can't bare to part with. I've pared back my wardrobe (well, ish), streamlined and feng shui'd my living room, and most determinedly, taken my substantial makeup collection to task. See other phrases that were coined in the USA.Ever since I started spending all of my time at home during the pandemic, I, like so many, have reevaluated my relationship to the many physical things taking up space in my tiny, cramped apartment. See other phrases first recorded by Captain Francis Grose.

Perhaps that's just the inadequacy or either records or research and that citations with the appropriate dates will emerge later. Whole kit and caboodle, (1884) is recorded before whole kit and boodle, (1888) and whole caboodle comes well before both, in 1848.

It is possible that that's what happened, but the dates of the known citations don't support it. What we can't confirm is that the word caboodle migrated from boodle in order to sound better when matched with kit. ' Kit and caboodle' had the advantage of the alliterative 'k' sound and that's doubtless why it has outlasted the others, which are now all fallen out of use. It is most likely that these phrases were in use simultaneously and that there isn't a clear parentage of one to another. 'More audiences have been disappointed by him and by the whole kit-and-caboodle of his rivals.' Which brings us finally to the whole kit and caboodleįrom the Syracuse Sunday Standard, New York, Nov, 1884: 'The whole caboodle will act upon the recommendation of the Ohio Sun.' 'A whole squad have got to permit to see you. 'I know a feller 'twould whip the whool boodle of 'em an' give 'em six.'įrom Bangor Daily Whig And Courier, Maine, 1839: '.and some of these college professors are just about as bad, the whole kit and bilin' of 'em are nothing in God's world but socialism in disguise!' In the gaming sense, when a man has 'lost his boodle', he has lost his pile or whole lot of money, whatever amount he happened to have with him.' Latterly, boodle has come to be somewhat synonymous with the word pile, the term in use at the gaming table, and signifying a quantity of money. 'The whole kit and boodle of them' is a New England expression in common use, and the word in this sense means the whole lot. 'It is probably derived from the Old-English word bottel, a bunch or a bundle, as a bottel of straw.

This piece, titled 'The Origin of Boodle', is from The Dunkirk Observer-Journal, New York, September 1888: It may still be a step along the way - either unrecorded before 1888 or recorded in an, as yet, undiscovered work.

From Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785.Īlthough this citation is slightly later than that of the final 'whole kit and caboodle', it's worth including as it gives a 19th-century version of the meaning of the term. The whole kit - the whole of a soldier's necessaries, the contents of his Caboodle was never in common use outside the USA and now has died out everywhere, apart from its use in this phrase. Most of them are of US origin and all the early citations are American. There are several phrases similar to the whole kit and caboodle, which is first recorded in that form in 1884. The words kit and caboodle have rather similar meanings.Ī kit - is set of objects, as in a toolkit, or what a soldier would put in his kit-bag.Ī caboodle (or boodle) - is an archaic term meaning group or collection, usually of people. What's the origin of the phrase 'The whole kit and caboodle'?

Black caboodle