wallet
Pluralwallets
- 1A small case, often flat and made of leather, for keeping money, especially paper money, along with credit cards and similar items.
She bought her father a slim leather wallet with room for six cards.
Pickpockets on the crowded train lifted three wallets before anyone noticed.
Similarbillfold
Note
The money case is the word's shrunken modern form. Middle English walet meant a bag or knapsack, of uncertain origin but perhaps from a Germanic root meaning "to roll", and the traveler's bag still carries that older meaning. British and American English share this everyday sense, and the word's figurative and digital uses grow out of it.
- 2Software, such as a phone app or online account, that stores money or payment details for paying electronically.
Customers can load money into their wallets in the app and pay at the register with a tap.
Losing the recovery phrase for your wallet can lock you out of your bitcoin for good.
Note
Two quite different kinds of software share the name. A payment wallet on a phone stores card details and usually hands the merchant a stand-in number rather than the real one. A cryptocurrency wallet holds no coins at all, only the private keys that prove who owns them, which is why losing its recovery phrase can mean losing the money.
- 3The money a person has, whether in a bank account or in other assets.
Voters tend to judge a president by what has happened to their wallets.
A fine that size will hit the company where it hurts: in the wallet.
Similarpocket, pocketbook
Note
The idiom to know is hit someone in the wallet: a scandal or a fine that does so costs them money. Salman Rushdie stretches the word further in Fury (2001), writing of those with "the leisure and wallet for fashion", where wallet stands for the means to pay, used without an article like a mass noun.
- 4A thick case or folder with plastic sleeves for storing compact discs.
Before the road trip, she filled a padded wallet with the band's entire catalog on CD.
Wallets stuffed with scratched compact discs still turn up at yard sales.
- 5A person's buttocks.
After six hours on the bus, my wallet was completely numb.
The coach told the players on the bench to get up off their wallets and cheer.
Similarbutt, backside, behind, rear
Note
The joke depends on the back pocket: the part of the body nearest where many people carry a wallet takes its name. Because the image is indirect, it reads as fun rather than crude, and it belongs to casual talk, as in landing on your wallet after a fall. In other contexts a listener will hear the money case first.
Less common meaning
- 6A bag or pouch, such as one carried by a traveler.
The pilgrim's wallet held little more than a crust of bread and a flask of water.
Peddlers walked from village to village with their goods packed in wallets on their backs.
Note
In older writing a wallet is a traveler's bag, big enough to hold provisions for the road, and a modern reader can easily mistake it for a billfold. Use it this way only in historical settings, with pilgrims or peddlers carrying their goods on their backs, where the context makes the size plain.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English walet ("bag, knapsack"), of uncertain origin. It is possibly from an assumed Old Northern French *walet ("roll; bag; knapsack"), from Proto-Germanic *wal- ("to roll"); compare walk, well and wallow.