The Whole Shebang

Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster openly describe this one's origin as obscure. "Shebang" first shows up in American English during the Civil War era, including in Walt Whitman's own diary entries, where it seems to have meant a crude hut or shelter. By the 1860s it had broadened out on the American frontier to mean almost any kind of establishment, a store, a house, a shop, even a type of vehicle, as Mark Twain used it in Roughing It (1872). The specific phrase "the whole shebang" is recorded from 1869, but exactly how a word for a rough shelter or a cart came to mean "everything" isn't explained anywhere in the record. It may simply be that "shebang" had already been stretched to cover so many different things that "the whole" of it naturally came to mean absolutely everything.