Meaning:
Having strong feelings of happiness or satisfaction.
Example: After coming home from a hard day of work, Bob’s wife announced that she was pregnant. Bob was very happy, or as one might put it, he was floating on cloud nine.
The Origin Of ‘On Cloud Nine’
It’s thought that this phrase may have come from meteorologists, who sometimes classify different types of clouds by using numbers. This expression doesn’t look that old. It was used in the Denton Record Chronicle, May 1949, when a woman named Betty Hutton was thrilled to have been accepted for a movie role:
“Let’s look in on Betty Hutton, who says she is hovering ‘on Cloud No Nine’ these days.”
Example Sentence(s)
- After months of searching for work, Brian felt like he would be unemployed forever. However, he was on cloud nine after finally finding a job that he liked.
Note: The origins for most popular sayings cannot be said with a certainty. What’s provided are theories that may be plausible to how a phrase originated, but not necessarily so.
In addition, quotes that contain a phrase may be taken from old newspapers, poems, or books that were written centuries ago, but this by no means shows they originated from these. In all likelihood, if an expression is being used in a newspaper, it’s probably already well known, and thus, from an older period of time.