"Alan Harding" <Alan@harding.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:LtQZbnWi2WgDFwVA@harding.demon.co.uk...

There's also a Cloud 7, also meaning a state of bliss, but presumably

blissful than Cloud 9. :)

one girl kicked me out of her apartment when i told her she only took me

Cloud 4.

Gravity

On Sun, 20 Nov 2005 22:44:09 -0500, "Jane"
<jarsenal66nospam@hotmail.com> wrote:

Thank you but what I really wanted to know was how it originated. Can you
find that?

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-clo1.htm

The phrase to be on cloud nine, meaning that one was blissfully
happy, started life in the United States and has been widely known
there since the 1950s; it's since spread worldwide. It's said to have
been popularised by the Johnny Dollar radio show of that period, in
which every time the hero was knocked unconscious he was transported
to Cloud Nine. But that wasn't the origin of the phrase. It's been
around since the 1930s, though early examples show a lot of numerical
variability, with the cloud sometimes being as low as number seven or
eight or as high as thirty-nine, though seven and nine were most
common.

These discrepancies make me suspect the usual explanation of its
origin, which is that it comes from the US Weather Bureau. The story
is that this organisation describes (or once described) clouds by an
arithmetic sequence. Level Nine was the very highest cumulonimbus,
which can reach 30,000 or 40,000 feet and appear as glorious white
mountains in the sky. So if you were on cloud nine you were at the
very peak of existence.

The term has always had close associations with the euphoria that is
induced by certain chemicals-alcohol in its earlier days but more
recently crack cocaine-so perhaps we shouldn't ask for too great a
level of exactness in counting. And the cloud here is an obvious
reference to some drug-induced dreamy floating sensation. But I
suspect, without having anything so restricting as evidence, that
seven was chosen because it's a traditional lucky number and that
today's more usual nine appears for similar reasons-for example it
also turns up in dressed to the nines and the whole nine yards.

On Sun, 20 Nov 2005 22:44:09 -0500, "Jane"
<jarsenal66nospam@hotmail.com> wrote:

Thank you but what I really wanted to know was how it originated. Can you
find that?

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-clo1.htm

The phrase to be on cloud nine, meaning that one was blissfully
happy, started life in the United States and has been widely known
there since the 1950s; it’s since spread worldwide. It’s said to have
been popularised by the Johnny Dollar radio show of that period, in
which every time the hero was knocked unconscious he was transported
to Cloud Nine. But that wasn’t the origin of the phrase. It’s been
around since the 1930s, though early examples show a lot of numerical
variability, with the cloud sometimes being as low as number seven or
eight or as high as thirty-nine, though seven and nine were most
common.

These discrepancies make me suspect the usual explanation of its
origin, which is that it comes from the US Weather Bureau. The story
is that this organisation describes (or once described) clouds by an
arithmetic sequence. Level Nine was the very highest cumulonimbus,
which can reach 30,000 or 40,000 feet and appear as glorious white
mountains in the sky. So if you were on cloud nine you were at the
very peak of existence.

The term has always had close associations with the euphoria that is
induced by certain chemicals—alcohol in its earlier days but more
recently crack cocaine—so perhaps we shouldn’t ask for too great a
level of exactness in counting. And the cloud here is an obvious
reference to some drug-induced dreamy floating sensation. But I
suspect, without having anything so restricting as evidence, that
seven was chosen because it’s a traditional lucky number and that
today’s more usual nine appears for similar reasons—for example it
also turns up in dressed to the nines and the whole nine yards.