A wallet is a flat case or pouch that can be used to carry such small personal items as paper currency, credit cards, and identification documents (driver’s license, identification card, club card, etc.), photographs, transit pass, business cards and other paper or laminated cards. Wallets are generally made of leather or fabrics, and they are usually pocket-sized and [bending|foldable].
Wallets may have characteristics such as money clips; a coin purse; a chain fastener, strap, or rein; or a zipper. Specialized wallets are designed for holding passports, wearable ID cards, and checkbooks to give some examples. Some unusual wallets are worn on the wrist or shoe. In addition to their practical function, wallets may be used as a fashion accessory, or to demonstrate the style, wealth, or status of the owner.
The word originated in the late 14th century, meaning “bag” or “knapsack”, from uncertain origin (Norman-French golette (little snout)?), or from similar Germanic word, from the Proto-Germanic term “wall”, which means “roll” (from the root “wel”, meaning “to turn or revolve.”(see for example “knapzak” in Dutch and Frisian). The early usage by Shakespeare described something that we would recognise as more like a backpack today. The modern meaning of “flat case for carrying paper money” is first recorded in 1834 in American English.
The ancient Greek word kibisis, said to describe the carried by the god Hermes and the sack in which the mythical hero Perseus carried the severed head of the monster Medusa, has been typically translated as “wallet”.
Ancient Greece
The classicist A. Y. Campbell set out to answer the question, “What…in ancient literature, are the uses of a wallet?” He deduced, as a Theocritean scholar, that “the wallet was the poor man’s portable larder; or, poverty apart, it was a thing that you stocked with provisions.” He found that sometimes a man may be eating out of it directly but the most characteristic references allude to its being “replenished as a store”, not in the manner of a lunch basket but more as a survival pack.
Renaissance
Wallets were developed after the introduction of paper currency to the West in the 1600s. (The first paper currency was introduced in the New World by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1690.) Prior to the introduction of paper currency, coin purses (usually simple drawstring leather pouches) were used for storing coins. Early wallets were made primarily of cow or horse leather and included a small pouch for printed calling cards.
In recounting the life of the Elizabethan merchant, John Frampton, Lawrence C. Wroth describes the merchant as, “a young English-man of twenty-five years, decently dressed, …, wearing a sword, and carrying fixed to his belt something he called a ‘bowgett’ (or budget), that is, a leathern pouch or wallet in which he carried his cash, his book of accounts, and small articles of daily necessity”.[
