lock, stock and barrel

Example: “They sold the farm lock, stock and barrel.”

Origin: Names the three essential components of a traditional musket: the lock, its firing mechanism, borrowing its name from its visual resemblance to a door lock; the stock, the wooden handle or butt a shooter braced against the shoulder, a sense of "stock" for a solid base documented as early as 1495; and the barrel, the cylindrical tube the bullet traveled through, an even older term well established by the 1400s. Owning a complete gun meant owning all three parts together, and the idiom borrowed that completeness for anything acquired or described in its absolute entirety, nothing left out. Sir Walter Scott used a related Scottish version in an 1817 letter — "like the Highlandman's gun, she wants stock, lock, and barrel, to put her into repair" — though the specific modern ordering and idiom appear to be North American in origin.