ZedDash

What is the origin of "as right as rain"? Or "as right as ninepence"?

Jeremy Reynolds, London

• Brewer's Phrase and Fable again, I'm afraid, but the phrase was "As NICE as Ninepence" which in turn came from "as nice as Nine pins"

  Julian McCarthy, Kingston-upon-Thames, UK

• Perhaps surprisingly, there have been expressions starting right as ... since medieval times, always in the sense of something being satisfactory, safe, secure or comfortable. An early example, quoted as a proverb as long ago as 1546, is right as a line. In that, right might have had a literal sense of straightness, something desirable in a line, but it also clearly has a figurative sense of being correct or acceptable. There's an even older example, from the Romance of the Rose of 1400: "right as an adamant", where an adamant was a lodestone or magnet. Lots of others have followed in the centuries since. There's right as a gun, which appeared in one of John Fletcher's plays, Prophetess, in 1622. Right as my leg is also from the seventeenth century is in Sir Thomas Urquhart's translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais, published in 1664: "Some were young, quaint, clever, neat, pretty, juicy, tight, brisk, buxom, proper, kind-hearted, and as right as my leg, to any man's thinking". There's right as a trivet from the nineteenth century, a trivet being a stand for a pot or kettle placed over an open fire; this may be found in Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers of 1837: "I hope you are well, sir." "Right as a trivet, sir,"; replied Bob Sawyer. About the same time, or a little later, people were saying that things were as right as ninepence, as right as a book, as right as nails, or as right as the bank. Right as rain is a latecomer to this illustrious collection of curious similes. It may have first appeared at the very end of the nineteenth century, but the first example I can find is from Max Beerbohm's book Yet Again of 1909: "He looked, as himself would undoubtedly have said, 'fit as a fiddle'"; or "right as rain". Since then it has almost completely taken over from the others. It makes no more sense than the variants it has usurped and is clearly just a play on words (though perhaps there's a lurking idea that rain often comes straight down, in a right line, to use the old sense). But the alliteration was undoubtedly why it was created and has helped its survival. As right as ninepence has had a good run, too, but that has vanished even in Britain since we decimalised the coinage and since ninepence stopped being worth very much.

  Tristan Childs, Maida Vale, England

• Michael Quinion, editor of the World Wide Words website, has been in touch with the Guardian to point out that the answer above, attributed to Tristan Childs, Maida Vale, England, is actually a piece that he wrote in 2000 for his site. Technical issues mean that we cannot currently remove or amend this answer without deleting the entire contents of this page, and so instead we are posting this note underneath to credit Mr Quinion with the authorship of the answer above, and to provide a link to the original version at http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-rig1.htm

  Rory Foster, Office of the readers' editor, the Guardian