I am all over the place at the moment - having been evicted from our home we're just getting a new place sorted out - I didn't think it would upset us as much as it has..

The derivation of this phrase is rather difficult to trace, not least because it has changed in both form and meaning over the nine centuries or so that it has been in use. The phrase was originally ‘to set on six and seven’ and is thought to have derived in the 14th century from the game of dice. The meaning then was ‘to carelessly risk one’s entire fortune’. The earliest citation in print is Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, 1374:

‘Six and seven’ is probably a corruption of ‘cinque and six’, French for the numerals five and six. Some may feel that this is a step too far, and the theory does set the folk-etymology antennae twitching. The OED supports the idea though, which will be good enough authority for most people. If things had stayed that way the origin of the phrase would be fairly cut and dried and there would be little more to say. As we know though, it is now given as ‘at sixes and sevens’, having mutated via ‘at six and seven’, and the current meaning refers to a state of confusion, disorder or disagreement, not one of risk. There’s no question of these different versions arising independently; the movement from one to another was gradual and they overlap each other in time. The first appearance in print of ‘at six and seven’ is in 1535 and the last citation of ‘on six and seven’ in 1601. The first appearance of ‘at sixes and sevens’ was in 1670, in Leti’s Il cardinalismo di Santa Chiesa, translated or, as the subtitle of the work helpfully notes, ‘faithfully Englished’ by G. H., 1670: