drawer

Named for the motion that opens it: draw in the sense "to move by pulling" plus -er, in use from the 16th century, with French tiroir as a close parallel. It is a separate formation from the agent noun "one who draws", which is two centuries older and names a person rather than a thing. Things go in a drawer, and you pull one out and push it shut.

Banking's name for the party who signs the order to pay. A check or bill of exchange involves three roles: the drawer, who writes it; the drawee, who is told to pay; and the payee, who receives the money. The drawer carries legal liability for the instrument, and a stipulation the drawer writes into a bill can limit the liability of later indorsers too.

The general agent noun takes whichever meaning of draw the context supplies, and usually needs an of-phrase to say which. Manny Fernandez's 2012 report on Texas voting maps writes of the drawers of electoral districts. Gordon Rayner's 2014 headline wanted a "discreet drawer of royal bath." Several trades narrowed it to one job, among them the banking term and the old word for a barman.

Interface designers borrowed the furniture word because the panel behaves like the sliding box: it waits hidden beyond the edge of the screen, slides into view when called, and slides away again. It holds secondary material such as menus, settings or filters, so the main content stays in place while the drawer is open.

The tavern servant of older fiction did more than pour. In Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), the drawer answers the bell and is sent off for musketeers and a surgeon. In Sheridan Le Fanu's The House by the Churchyard (1863), a character recalls being a drawer at an inn in Newmarket. For a modern bar, bartender or barman is the natural word.

Before another noun, the plural-only garment word drops its -s: drawer style, drawer type, the shirt-and-drawer type of underwear. The pattern belongs to the underwear trade press, from The Corset and Underwear Review (1918) to a 1935 Democrat and Chronicle advertisement. Drawers itself is now dated or regional for underpants, so these compounds read as period vocabulary.

A word from the era of hand haulage in the mines. The drawer moved loaded tubs or wagons of coal from the working face to the shaft, and was often a child or young worker in early collieries. Because the job is historical, the word belongs in writing about the past; wagoner is its near equivalent.

Usually met in the compound toddy drawer, as in F. E. Penny's Pulling the Strings. The drawing here is of liquid, like the barman drawing beer, but from a living tree. The worker climbs to the crown of the palm, scores the flower stalks and collects the dripping sap, which is then fermented into toddy.