How a Misspelled Clay Led to Piggy Banks
During the Middle Ages, people stored their spare coins in jars made of a cheap, orange-colored clay called "pygg." As English spelling evolved, the clay's name came to sound exactly like the animal. In the 19th century, potters began shaping these clay money boxes into the actual shapes of pigs as a playful pun, creating the iconic piggy banks we use today.
The Practical Household Clay
In medieval Western Europe, long before specialized savings containers were mass-produced, everyday domestic objects served as rudimentary repositories for loose wealth. Potters of the Middle Ages relied on an inexpensive, orange-colored earthenware clay known as pygg. This material was widely accessible, durable enough for daily utility, and far cheaper than metals, glazed fine ceramics, or imported goods. Common households used this clay to produce kitchen staples, including mixing bowls, flagons, water pitchers, and wide-mouthed storage jars.
Because ordinary people had no access to commercial banking facilities, surplus coins were typically hidden around the home. A common method was dropping spare coins into one of these pygg-clay kitchen pots. Over generations, these utilitarian vessels became colloquially associated with accumulated household savings, creating a recognized habit of maintaining a dedicated domestic money container.
Linguistic Shifts and a Potter's Pun
The transformation of a functional clay pot into a swine-shaped novelty is rooted in the natural evolution of the English language. In Old and early Middle English, the word for the orange clay and the word for the animal were phonetically distinct. The domestic swine was originally referred to by terms like swine or Old English forms such as picg, while the pottery clay was spelled and pronounced as pygg. Over several centuries, vowel shifts altered English speech patterns, gradually causing the pronunciation of the clay to merge with the name of the farm animal.
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the original material meaning of pygg had faded from common knowledge, but the term pygg bank survived in popular idiom. Artisans and commercial potters in Great Britain noticed the homophonic overlap and began producing money containers shaped like literal pigs as a visual pun. The novelty proved popular with consumers, permanently linking the savings vessel to the image of the animal.