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Sigilbreaker26
On page 9, "dime" was supposed to be "dame"?
nope, she's saying she's a Dime (a 10)
She's dressed "to the nines" which means perfection. The phrase is scottish in origin, and proliferation is attributed to a poet. It isn't clear if he coined it, altered it, or stole it. No one knows exactly why "Nine" is used at the bar of perfection, theories range from 9 being the largest single-digit number, to (being its a poet) it was simply an easy word to rhyme.
Nope, dime is slang for an attractive woman, because as the other guy says, a dime is worth ten cents and an attractive woman is a 10/10, and it's there to set up the pun since dressed to the nines means dressed up for an occasion, so it's both a rhyme and a nine/ten joke.
Technically "dime" is short for "dime piece"/"Dimepiece".
Using Dime Piece to refer to an attractive woman was a slight twisting of a previous term.
A "Dime piece" referred to a small, cheap two-shot derringer, a version that used to be able to be acquired for 10 cents (back in the 1880s). Your "dime piece" was a gentlemen's or gambler's last-resort defense weapon, something you would keep on you at all times including trying to get it through patdowns, incase you were being swindled or robbed. So a woman you wanted to keep close at hand at all cost my might refer to as your "dime piece", but this usage largely faded out in the early 1900s as "riverboat gambling" culture faded and moral crackdowns rose.
It reemerged - either as a deliberate reworking or a convergent evolution - to the current meaning as "a woman who is 10 of 10 on attractiveness"