Piggy Bank

The true history of the Piggy Bank is still somewhat uncertain but there appears to be a consensus that it derives its name from the orange clay, "pygg" from which it was originally made. In the Middle Ages people used to store items such as salt in wide necked jars which were made from a clay called "pygg". The so called "pig" jar retained its name long after potters stopped using "pygg" clay to produce pottery. 

Money also used to be kept in the jars and in England, by the turn of the eighteen century, the jars had acquired the name of "pig banks", from where followed the name "piggy bank." These piggy banks were ceramic and had no hole in the bottom, so the pig had to be broken to get the money out.

Another theory is that the piggy bank acquired its name because it was fed the scraps and leftovers of ones small change until it was fat enough to be smashed, and the savings retrieved.

The story may be based on a misunderstanding. In Scotland and northern England, pig — occasionally pygg, though that’s just a variant or dialectal spelling of pig — was used from about 1450 as a general term for earthenware products, including pots, pitchers, jars and crockery. The references to the colour orange in the story presumably derive from a common colour of unglazed earthenware.

The experts are unsure where this sense of pig came from. It might have been from piggin, a wooden pail (though that could sometimes mean an earthenware pitcher), or be related to prig, a dialect term for a small pitcher; it might conceivably at some point in its history have been influenced by the animal sense of pig, because a few items, such as ceramic hot-water bottles, are smoothly rounded like a pig’s body and have indeed been called pigs.

Scots named their coin banks pirly pigs, probably from the older Scots pyrl, to thrust or poke, suggesting the action of inserting a coin. The pig refers not to their shape but to the class of earthenware items to which they belonged.