Why We Say "Seventh Heaven" and "At Sixes and Sevens": The Real Origins of Number Idioms

Numbers show up constantly in the idioms of everyday speech, and it's tempting to assume they're there for numerological or mystical reasons — especially if you already spend time thinking about what it means when you keep seeing 11:11 or 444. But the real history of number idioms is almost always more interesting than a tidy numerology chart, and considerably messier. Some, like "seventh heaven," really do trace back to structured religious cosmology stretching across two major faith traditions. Others, like "at sixes and sevens" or "back to square one," have murky origins that professional etymologists still argue about, with popular explanations that turn out to be centuries too late to be true. And at least one, "Catch-22," was coined by a single author in a single year and can be traced with total precision. This piece walks through the documented, source-checked etymology of the number idioms English speakers use every day — being explicit, per idiom, about where the historical record is solid and where it is genuinely uncertain — and then looks briefly at how other languages build their own idiomatic meaning around numbers.

"In seventh heaven" is one of the few number idioms with an origin that isn't really in dispute: it comes directly from a structured, multi-tiered model of the heavens found in both Islamic and Jewish religious cosmology, long before it became an English figure of speech for blissful happiness. In the Islamic tradition, the Quran refers to seven heavens (as-samāwāt as-sab') in several places, including verses 41:12, 65:12, and 71:15, and later commentary and hadith literature elaborated this into a layered cosmology in which each heaven is composed of a different material and houses different prophets, with the seventh — described as pure light, and associated with Abraham — representing the highest and closest position to the divine throne, per the summary tradition preserved in sources like Wikipedia's "Seven heavens" article, which draws on classical Islamic exegesis.

Jewish cosmology developed a parallel structure independently, described in rabbinic literature such as the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Chagigah) and various midrashim, which name seven heavens in ascending order — commonly given as Vilon, Raki'a, Shehaqim, Zebul, Ma'on, Machon, and Araboth — with the seventh, Araboth, described as containing the divine throne and the most exalted angelic beings. Both traditions likely draw, at some historical remove, on older Mesopotamian and Babylonian astronomical cosmology, which organized the heavens around the seven visible moving bodies known to ancient observers: the Sun, the Moon, and five planets. That shared ancient root helps explain why two separate religious traditions converged on the same number of heavenly layers, with the highest one carrying the most exalted, blissful status.

The jump from "the seventh heaven is where God's throne is" to "I'm in seventh heaven" as an English expression of intense happiness happened later, as the concept filtered into English through religious and literary channels and through the phrase's absorption into Yiddish and other European languages that had their own contact with rabbinic tradition. By the 19th century, "in seventh heaven" had become a settled English idiom, appearing in general usage divorced from any specific theological argument — dictionaries including Merriam-Webster and Collins now define it simply as a state of extreme joy or ecstasy, with no religious content required to use it correctly.

What makes "seventh heaven" a useful contrast to the other idioms in this piece is that its cosmological logic is transparent and well-documented on both sides — you can point to the Quranic verses and to the Talmudic passages and see, in each case, why the seventh position specifically was assigned the highest status. That's unusual. Most number idioms don't have anything nearly this coherent behind them, and the ones that follow in this piece show what happens when a phrase's real origin gets lost, mangled, or replaced with a folk explanation that sounds better than the truth.

"At sixes and sevens," meaning a state of confusion, disorganization, or disagreement, is a genuinely contested etymology, and it's worth walking through why, because it's a good example of how a phrase can be nearly 650 years old and still not have a settled origin story. The expression is documented in something close to its modern sense as early as Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, around 1374 — evidence gathered by sources including World Wide Words and Phrase Finder places the earliest form as "to set on six and seven," which shows up in Middle English gambling and dice contexts before the word order and grammar shifted over the following three centuries into "at six and seven" (1535), then finally the modern plural "at sixes and sevens," which doesn't appear until roughly 1670, cemented by Captain Francis Grose's 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

The leading scholarly theory, favored by sources like World Wide Words, ties the phrase to the medieval dice game of hazard, in which "cinque and sice" — French-derived terms for five and six — represented the riskiest possible bet, since staking everything on those numbers meant gambling recklessly with one's whole fortune. Over time, as French numeral terms fell out of everyday English use, folk etymology is thought to have reshaped "cinque and sice" into the more familiar English numbers "six" and "seven," even though seven isn't achievable on a single die — which may be part of why the phrase came to connote nonsensical confusion rather than just risk.

A popular competing explanation involves a 1484 (some sources say 1515) precedence dispute between two London livery companies, the Merchant Taylors and the Skinners, which was resolved by having the two guilds alternate between sixth and seventh place in the City of London's official order of precedence. It's a charming story and gets repeated often, but multiple etymology sources flag it as almost certainly false as an origin, for a simple chronological reason: Chaucer was already using the phrase over a century before that dispute occurred. A tidy story that happens to postdate its supposed origin can't be the origin, no matter how well it fits.

A third, weaker theory ties the numbers to Job 5:19 in the King James Bible ("He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee"), but as multiple sources note, this connection is speculative at best and doesn't explain the phrase's actual documented usage pattern, which is about disorder rather than deliverance from trouble.

The honest summary, and the one this piece adopts, is the one World Wide Words itself gives: the derivation is genuinely difficult to trace with certainty. The dice-game explanation currently has the strongest circumstantial case — it fits the earliest documented forms and the general semantic drift from "reckless risk" to "confused mess" — but readers should treat it as the leading theory, not a proven fact, and be skeptical of any source that presents the livery-company story as settled history, since the dates simply don't support it.

"Third time's the charm" (and its older British cousin, "third time lucky") is another idiom where the popular explanation is more colorful than the evidence supports. A commonly repeated story claims the phrase comes from old English law supposedly granting freedom to anyone who survived three attempts at hanging — and it even has a famous real-world hook, the case of John "Babbacombe" Lee, who survived three botched execution attempts in 1885. The problem, as Phrase Finder documents, is straightforward: the phrase was already circulating well before 1885, which makes the hanging story a retroactive folk explanation rather than a genuine origin. Elizabeth Barrett Browning referenced "the luck of the third adventure" as already proverbial in an 1839 letter, and Alexander Hislop's 1862 collection The Proverbs of Scotland records "The third time's lucky" as settled folk wisdom decades before Lee's execution.

The more likely explanation, per the same source, is simpler and less dramatic: three is a culturally satisfying number for persistence — two attempts can feel insufficient to prove a pattern, while four starts to feel excessive, so folklore, storytelling, and everyday speech converged on three as the number that represents "you get one more fair shot." The American variant "third time's a charm" appears to have developed somewhat independently, with an early citation traced to The Weekly Sentinel in 1912, suggesting parallel folk development rather than a single traceable coinage on either side of the Atlantic.

"Back to square one," meaning to restart an effort from scratch after failure, has its own set of competing theories, and here too the popular explanation is probably wrong. The most frequently repeated story credits 1920s BBC radio football commentary: producer Lance Sieveking is said to have devised a grid dividing the football pitch into eight numbered squares (published in the Radio Times around January 1927) so listeners following along with a printed diagram in the newspaper could track exactly where play was happening. It's a great story, but etymology researchers, including World Wide Words and Phrase Finder, note real problems with it: the printed grid used rectangles, not squares; no surviving recording or transcript actually uses the phrase "back to square one"; and the BBC had abandoned the grid system by the mid-1930s — roughly two decades before the phrase's earliest confirmed print appearance.

That earliest confirmed appearance, according to Phrase Finder's research, shows up in a 1952 issue of the Economic Journal, in a passage comparing something to "a sort of intellectual game of snakes and ladders" where a reader keeps being sent back to square one — which points toward the board game Snakes and Ladders (or the related children's game hopscotch, which also uses numbered squares players return to) as the more plausible source, since both games structurally involve numbered starting squares that a player can be forced back to. Even this theory has a wrinkle, though: most historical Snakes and Ladders boards don't actually place a snake landing directly back on square one, so the connection is suggestive rather than airtight.

The responsible conclusion, echoed across multiple etymology sources, is that "back to square one" almost certainly has a board-game-adjacent origin rather than a broadcasting one, but that no single citation proves it definitively, and readers should treat the BBC football theory as a widely circulated but largely discredited explanation rather than fact.

"Number one" as a stand-in for oneself — as in "look out for number one" — draws on the simple, ancient logic of ordinal ranking: being first, or being "number one," has signaled priority and self-importance in English for centuries, well before it hardened into a set idiomatic phrase about self-interest. This is a case where the etymology is less about a single traceable coining event and more about the gradual idiomatic ossification of an obvious numerical metaphor — first place equals top priority — that shows up in related expressions across the language, from ranking one's own interests above all others to children learning "number one" as a euphemism.

"Public enemy number one," by contrast, has an unusually precise and well-documented origin, thanks to Prohibition-era American law enforcement. According to research compiled at Word Histories, the phrase traces to the Chicago Crime Commission's decision in 1930 to compile and publicize a list of the city's most significant gangland figures — a "public enemies" list of 26 names, first reported by the Chicago Daily Tribune on September 17, 1930, following a batch of vagrancy warrants issued by Municipal Judge John H. Lyle. Al Capone topped that list.

The specific phrase "public enemy number one," applied directly to Capone, appears in print within weeks: Word Histories cites the Albuquerque Journal on October 10, 1930, contrasting Ralph Capone as "public enemy number 2" against his brother "Scarface Al, who is public enemy number one," and by October 13, 1930, the Green Bay Press-Gazette was already running the shorthand headline label "No. 1 public enemy." The speed of adoption — a specific numbered-list label going from law-enforcement terminology to nationwide newspaper shorthand within about a month — is itself notable and reasonably well documented, which makes this one of the more solidly sourced number-idiom origins in this piece.

From there, "public enemy number one" widened out from its original, specific application to named Prohibition-era gangsters into general usage for anyone or anything considered society's greatest threat, eventually feeding into later cultural references (including the FBI's own "Ten Most Wanted" framework and, much later, the name of the hip-hop group Public Enemy), while retaining its core numerical logic: number one on any threat list is the worst one.

Most idioms in this piece emerged gradually, over centuries, through processes historians can only partially reconstruct. "Catch-22" is the rare exception: a number idiom whose birth can be dated to a specific author and a specific year, because it comes directly from the title of Joseph Heller's 1961 satirical war novel, in which the fictional military regulation "Catch-22" describes a no-win bureaucratic trap — airmen can be grounded from combat duty for insanity, but requesting to be grounded is itself proof of a rational fear of danger, and therefore proof of sanity, so no one can actually escape flying more missions.

The number 22 itself has no deep symbolic weight; it was essentially arbitrary, and the novel's title went through several earlier numbered versions before settling there. According to background reporting including Mental Floss's account of the book's publication history, Heller's working title was originally "Catch-18," but his publisher grew concerned about the number colliding with Leon Uris's recently released World War II novel Mila 18. The title reportedly cycled through other candidates — including "Catch-11," dropped for evoking the heist film Ocean's Eleven, and a possible "Catch-17," too close to the war film Stalag 17 — before landing on 22, which had no such conflicts and, as it turned out, had a pleasing repetitive ring to it.

What makes "Catch-22" valuable for this essay isn't just that its origin is verifiable — it's that the phrase's journey from "title of a specific novel" to "generic English idiom for any absurd, self-defeating rule or situation" happened remarkably fast and is well tracked by dictionaries, which now define "catch-22" generically, lowercase, unhyphenated in casual use, and entirely divorced from its original military-satire context. It's essentially a controlled experiment in idiom formation: a single writer picks a number for mostly practical, non-symbolic reasons (avoiding title collisions with other books and films), and within a couple of decades that number becomes shorthand recognized by people who have never read the novel it came from.

It's also a useful corrective to numerology-flavored thinking about number idioms in general: the number 22 in "Catch-22" carries no hidden numerological significance whatsoever — it was chosen, by Heller's own account and his publisher's, essentially by process of elimination against other books' titles — yet the phrase became one of the most durable and recognizable number idioms of the 20th century anyway. The stickiness came from the concept and the repetition of the digits, not from any deeper meaning assigned to 22 itself.

English isn't unique in building idiomatic meaning around numbers, and looking briefly at other languages helps clarify what's actually going on cognitively when a number gets recruited into figurative speech. Japanese offers a widely documented example in tetraphobia — avoidance of the number four — because shi, the Sino-Japanese reading of "four," is a homophone of the word for "death." As catalogued in sources including Wikipedia's "Tetraphobia" article and multiple cultural explainers, this homophone has real, concrete consequences: many Japanese (and other East Asian) hospitals, hotels, and apartment buildings skip the number four for room and floor numbering, the same way some Western buildings skip a thirteenth floor. It's a case where an idiomatic-level superstition about a number derives directly from a sound coincidence in the language rather than from any narrative or historical event — a different mechanism than most of the English examples above, but a documented one.

Italian gives us a case where a number idiom actually became a permanent, global English loanword rather than staying a local figure of speech: "quarantine." As Etymonline and multiple historical sources confirm, the word comes from Italian quaranta giorni, "forty days," referring to the isolation period Venice imposed on ships arriving from plague-affected regions starting in 1377, requiring them to wait offshore before entering port. The term entered English in the 1660s specifically in that maritime-isolation sense, before broadening by the 1670s into the general meaning of any enforced period of isolation — meaning that everyday English speakers use a number idiom rooted in 14th-century Venetian public-health policy every time they say "quarantine," almost always without realizing there's a number embedded in it at all.

French offers a more folklore-flavored example in être aux cent coups, literally "to be at a hundred blows/strikes," used to mean being extremely worried or in a state of distress. Several French-language sources trace a proposed monastic origin for the phrase, tied to the historical practice of ringing monastery bells up to a hundred times to signal a serious event or alarm to the surrounding community — though, in keeping with the theme of this whole essay, that specific origin story, like several of the English examples above, is treated by some linguists as a plausible folk explanation rather than an airtight documented fact, and readers should hold it with the same appropriate skepticism as the livery-company theory for "sixes and sevens."

What these idioms share with their English counterparts is a pattern: a number gets picked up by a real historical practice, game, law, sound-alike word, or narrative structure, and then the number outlives the original context entirely, becoming portable shorthand that native speakers use fluently without needing (or often having) any idea where it came from. That's precisely what makes numbers such durable idiom material in any language: they're compact, they're unambiguous compared to vaguer descriptive words, and they create an instant mental category — "first," "seventh," "forty," "twenty-two" — that the brain can file and retrieve far more easily than an equivalent phrase built from adjectives alone.

Numbers also carry built-in rhythm and memorability that prose language often lacks: "sixes and sevens," "third time's the charm," and "Catch-22" all have a clean, almost musical cadence, aided by alliteration, parallel structure, or simple repetition, that makes them easy to say, easy to remember, and easy to pass along by word of mouth for generations — which is, in the end, the real mechanism behind every idiom in this piece, whether its origin is a documented 1930 crime list, a 1961 novel, or a dice game whose exact history has been genuinely lost to time.

• seventh heaven, n. — Oxford English Dictionary
• Seven heavens — Wikipedia
• At Sixes And Sevens — Meaning & Origin Of The Phrase — Phrase Finder
• At Sixes and Sevens: Origin of a Confusing Phrase — World Wide Words
• Third Time Lucky — Meaning & Origin Of The Phrase — Phrase Finder
• Back to square one — World Wide Words
• Back To Square One — Meaning & Origin Of The Phrase — Phrase Finder
• The first 'public enemy number one' was Al Capone — Word Histories
• public enemy number one, n. — Oxford English Dictionary
• 15 Things You Might Not Know About Catch-22 — Mental Floss
• Tetraphobia — Wikipedia
• Quarantine — Etymology, Origin & Meaning — Etymonline