The Curious History of the Piggy Bank
If you’ve ever dropped spare change into a rotund, smiling, ceramic pig, you may have wondered: Why a pig? The idea of putting coins inside a chubby farm animal may seem whimsical, but the story of how pigs became the symbol of savings reaches back further than you might expect — and the real explanation busts a common myth that’s been circulating since the 1990s.
Pigs as the Original Savings Account
Before there were coin jars, there were pigs — real ones. In modest households across Europe, pigs were literal stores of value. A piglet bought in spring could be fattened on kitchen scraps and garden waste and, come winter, would provide both food and money. As the Bank of Canada Museum puts it, “A pig — a real one — is an excellent store of value.” In many rural communities, a family’s pig was essentially its bank: a source of meat, trade goods, or emergency cash. This value was collected by slaughtering the pig, just like how you might break a piggy bank to access the coins it stores.
This down-to-earth connection between pigs and thrift helps explain why the animal became a symbol of savings in many cultures. In Germanic folklore, pigs represent luck and plenty. Someone who’s had a stroke of good fortune is said to have Schwein gehabt — literally, “got pig.” Even today, New Year’s Eve in parts of Europe is celebrated with marzipan or chocolate candies known as “lucky pigs.” It was likely German immigrants, with their own Sparschwein (“saving pig”), who carried this fond association to the United States around the start of the 20th century.
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The Myth of the Orange Clay
Still, if you’ve spent time online or read one of the many popular history books on the origins of everyday things, you’ve probably heard another story. There’s a common myth that claims that the word “piggy” comes from pygg, an orange clay supposedly used in the Middle Ages in Western Europe to make cheap household dishes, pots, and jars. The story goes that people would drop their spare coins into jars made of pygg. Centuries later, when the word pygg was forgotten but the sound remained, potters began shaping money jars like pigs — a pun that stuck.
It’s a clever tale, but one with no historical basis. On his website, etymologist Michael Quinion calls it “false in every particular.” No record exists of pygg clay, orange or otherwise, except for in modern retellings of the piggy bank story, and there’s no evidence that medieval English people called their coin jars pygg banks. The myth seems to have spread from a 1989 popular-knowledge book and was amplified by chain emails and blogs in the early days of the internet. Like a good fable, it endures because it’s simple and funny — not because it’s true.
When “Pig” Meant Pottery
It’s possible that there’s a link between pigs and money that does have to do with language, however. In Scotland and northern England, the word “pig” referred to all sorts of earthenware vessels — pitchers, jars, and pots — as far back as the 15th century. (The word was occasionally spelled pygg as a variant, but had nothing to do with a particular kind of clay.) It’s not clear where this meaning of “pig” came from, but it might have been influenced by the roundness of some of the objects, or perhaps from the older word piggin (a small pail).
By the late 1700s in Scotland, pirly pigs — money banks with a slot for coins — were in use. The word pirly may come from pyrl, meaning “to poke,” as in poking coins into the slot. But this use of “pig” referred to the class of earthenware vessel to which it belonged, and the banks were not shaped like the animal.
The Birth of the Pig Bank
What we now call “piggy banks” didn’t always have such a cutesy name. Initially, they were just called “pig banks.” The earliest known reference to a “pig bank” appears in an 1898 Jersey Journal item. There’s a similar example from the Oregonian in 1900: “The latest novelty — The Pig Bank. You have to kill the pig to get the money — 25¢ each.” That phrasing — “kill the pig” — wasn’t just cute marketing; it described the design. These early pig banks had no removable stopper, so the only way to retrieve your coins was to smash the vessel open. Inconvenient, yes, but it encouraged thrift and discouraged theft.
The word “piggy bank” doesn’t appear on record until about a decade later, in a 1913 issue of The Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette. By then, the coin-storing pig had become a fixture in children’s rooms, a charming mix of toy and moral lesson on the value of saving. The first mention of a “piggy bank” in the millions of newspapers preserved by the Library of Congress’ “Chronicling America” website comes in 1914, in a column called “Sleepy Time Stories” that ran in a New Jersey newspaper. It describes a child being promised a quarter in a piggy bank if she can figure out how to lure her brother away from some toy trains.
Coin-Holding Pigs Around the World
The idea of putting coins into pigs isn’t unique to the U.S. or Europe. Long before American kids were dropping nickels into smiling porcelain pigs, people elsewhere had similar ideas. Archaeologists have uncovered terracotta pig-shaped money boxes from roughly 14th-century Java called celengans, after the Javanese word for “pig.” These centuries-old “piggy banks” are thought to have been used to store Chinese copper coins and symbolized prosperity. However, this tradition is unlikely to have influenced the piggy banks of today — and it might just be another example of the symbolic power of the pig across cultures.
Why the Pig Endures
The piggy bank, then, isn’t the product of a simple pun on pygg. While the precise origins are unclear, they may involve a confluence of linguistic quirks, cultural symbolism, and practical farming economics. Real pigs fattened a family’s fortune; clay pigs protected coins until the time came to “harvest” them. German Sparschwein crossed the Atlantic, and by the early 20th century, American “pig banks” had become “piggy banks” — icons of thrift that still survive in kids’ rooms and bank commercials. Even today, the pig remains the mascot of saving, whether in ceramic, plastic, or app form.
