Wallet once meant a knapsack, not a pocket for cards
Today's flat wallet holds cash, cards and IDs, but the word first appeared in late fourteenth-century English for a bag or knapsack, and Shakespeare's wallets were closer to backpacks. Translators even render Hermes's pouch, the kibisis, as a wallet, and one classicist called the ancient version a poor man's portable larder.
Most wallets are pocket-sized, foldable and made of leather or fabric, carrying banknotes, credit and debit cards, a driving licence, photographs, transit passes and business cards. Some add a money clip, coin purse, chain, snap or zipper, specialised models hold passports or checkbooks, a few are strapped to the wrist or shoe, and many serve as fashion statements of wealth and status.
The word's roots are murky: maybe Norman French golette, little snout, or a Germanic term from Proto-Germanic wall, roll, as in Dutch knapzak. The modern sense of a flat case for paper money first appears in American English in 1834. The classicist A. Y. Campbell, studying Theocritus, concluded the ancient wallet was restocked like a survival pack rather than packed like a lunch basket. The Greek kibisis was also the sack in which Perseus carried Medusa's severed head.
Flat wallets followed paper money, which reached the West in the 1600s; the Massachusetts Bay Colony issued the New World's first notes in 1690. Before that people kept coins in drawstring leather purses, and early wallets, of cow or horse leather, had a pocket for printed calling cards. The Elizabethan merchant John Frampton hung a leather bowgett, or budget, on his belt for cash, accounts and daily necessities.
Wallets once held dried meat and private treasures too. In nineteenth-century America wearing one on the belt was thought semi-civilized, and pocket carry uncommon. Spaniards used small leather wallets for flint, steel and dry tinder called yesca. Card slots arrived with credit cards in the early 1950s, velcro in the 1970s, and cryptocurrency wallets now guard secret keys.
Source: Wallet
