Dressed to the nines
About the entry for "dressed to the nines": I note that Cervantes mentions "outfitting his donkey to the ninety-nines" in "Don Quixote", which seems to have been written before any of the other sources cited so it must have originated from further antiquity.
That's worth some further investigation, with a word of caution. Cervantes is given credit for various phrases which he didn't coin but which only appear in the later Victorian translations of Quixote into English.
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- Dressed to the nines RRC 01/July/09