The Whole Kit and Caboodle

A very American piece of 19th-century wordplay, built by pairing two words that already meant roughly the same thing for emphasis. "Kit" had meant a collection or set of belongings, like a soldier's kit-bag, since the mid-1700s. "Caboodle" is a play on the earlier American word "boodle," which by the 1830s meant a crowd or a whole lot of something. "The whole caboodle" is recorded alone from 1848, with "kit and caboodle" joining together by 1884, likely stuck together simply because they shared that satisfying hard "k" sound. Strictly speaking, the phrase is a redundancy, since either word alone already meant "the whole lot."