Originally Posted by Garfield Cat

The whole kit and caboodle

Meaning

A collection of things.

Origin

The words kit and caboodle have rather similar meanings.

A kit - is set of objects, as in a toolkit, or what a soldier would put in his kit-bag.

A caboodle (or boodle) - is an archaic term meaning group or collection, usually of people.

There are several phrases similar to the whole kit and caboodle, which is first recorded in that form in 1884. Most of them are of US origin and all the early citations are American. Caboodle was never in common use outside the USA and now has died out everywhere, apart from its use in this phrase.

- The whole kit - the whole of a soldier's necessaries, the contents of his knapsack. From Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785.

- The whole kit and boodle

Although this citation is slightly later than that of the final 'whole kit and caboodle', it's worth including as it gives a 19th-century version of the meaning of the term. It may still be a step along the way - either unrecorded before 1888 or recorded in an, as yet, undiscovered work. This piece, titled 'The Origin of Boodle', is from The Dunkirk Observer-Journal, New York, September 1888:

"It is probably derived from the Old-English word bottel, a bunch or a bundle, as a bottel of straw. "The whole kit and boodle of them" is a New England expression in common use, and the word in this sense means the whole lot. Latterly, boodle has come to be somewhat synonymous with the word pile, the term in use at the gaming table, and signifying a quantity of money. In the gaming sense, when a man has "lost his boodle", he has lost his pile or whole lot of money, whatever amount he happened to have with him."