English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
It's not a book, and it doesn't fit in anyone's pocket. Why does my brother-in-law insist on calling his wife's purse a pocketbook?
I'm interested in the etymology, and in the chronological and geographical distribution of this expression. My sister & I (raised in southern California, can't get used to such an obvious misnomer) vs. bro-in-law (raised in New England, doesn't understand why we're bothered) are only one data point, and only on the geographical scale.
From a blog entry at Separated by a Common Language, I learned that Luanne von Schneidemesser wrote about the word purse and its synonyms in a 1980 piece for American Speech. The article is dated, but addresses part of your question directly.
Her etymology of pocketbook mirrors answers given here already:
Pocketbook was originally just that: a small book that could be carried in the pocket. The OED shows that by 1685 it was understood also to be a "book for notes, memoranda, etc., intended to be carried in the pocket; a notebook; also, a book-like case of leather or the like, having compartments for papers, bank-notes, bills, etc." In the last meaning the DAE attests its use in the United States since 1816.
She then analyzes responses given from a 1000-person sample of Americans to the question, "What do you keep money in when you carry it around with you?", posed in a survey done for the Dictionary of American Regional English.
After a discussion of the distribution of wallet and billfold, she addresses purse, pocketbook, and handbag:
Purse, pocketbook, and handbag are all standard terms reported from all parts of the country. Yet purse, according to DARE's 569 responses, is not quite as frequent in the Northeast and coastal Atlantic states as it is to the west of those areas. In the eastern areas, pocketbook (395 responses) appears about as often as purse; but farther west, it becomes sparser. Both purse and pocketbook are distributed by age, community type, race, and education in correspondence with the total DARE sample.
This last point seems to rule out any significant generational differences among pocketbook respondents—30 years ago, that is.
Schneidemesser cites two other surveys in her piece. In one done for the Linguistic Atlas of New England, she notes a size distinction between purse and pocketbook with the former being considered a "small pouch or similar container for coins or other money," and the latter a "larger receptacle used to contain paper money as well as other articles," including a purse. In the second, for Elizabeth Bright's Word Geography of California and Nevada, she shows only 16 percent of respondents used the term pocketbook.
Purse and Its Synonyms, American Speech, Vol. 55, No. 1 [Spring, 1980], pp. 74-76
Edit 3/4/11:
An informal survey of five female family members (lifelong New Englanders) shows there may be some generational shift after all:
great-grandmother: pocketbook (reportedly)
grandmother: pocketbook/bag
mother: pocketbook/purse
sister: purse
niece: purse
pocketbook
1610s, originally a small book meant to be carried in one’s pocket, from pocket + book. Meaning “a booklike leather folder for papers, bills, etc.” is from 1722. Meaning "a woman's purse" is from 1816.
"Pocketbook didn’t come into use until the 1600s, but almost as soon as it did, it was used to mean, among other things, “wallet,” or “money holder”—pretty much what purse originally meant, though by this point purse had acquired additional, general- purpose senses. The OED’s earliest citation for purse as something that would tend to belong to a woman, however, is dated 1955; its citations for pocketbook in this sense date back to 1830. Perhaps you should remind your wife that she doesn’t need a pocket to have pocket money nor a suit to pack a suitcase. Pocketbook is in the same, um, bag. It’s a perfectly good word—maybe even a better word for her than handbag if she, like me, slings the thing over her shoulder." – Barbara Wallraff
It was originally (early 17th century) literally a small note book that you would carry in your pocket; from this it, moved fairly quickly (late 17th century) to describing a sort of early wallet: ‘A pocket-sized folding case for holding banknotes, papers, etc.’. [I’d always assumed that this transition went via a sense of being a book for noting financial transactions; but if this is the case, it’s not documented by the OED, Etymonline, or anywhere else I can find.] From there it went to being any sort of wallet or purse; from there, it evolved (19th century; roughly in parallel with US usage of purse) to describe in particular a small women’s handbag. This seems to be the point at which it became largely a US word, and died out in the UK.
There’s a memorable episode of a lost pocketbook in one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House on the Prairie’ series — I can’t remember which one…
All I know is this, which is not very much:
1610s, originally a small book meant to be carried in one’s pocket, from pocket + book. Meaning “a booklike leather folder for papers, bills, etc.” is from 1722. Meaning "a woman's purse" is from 1816.
Source: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pocketbook
An extremely speculative hypothesis about its origin: perhaps "book" was misheard as "bag", or "book" was pronounced much like "bag" in some 1800s dialect or accent, leading to this odd usage of "pocketbook". Then again, it might as well be ordinary metonymy, where head and modifier are reversed: *bookpocket would be a perfectly logical word that made sense, if it existed.
Such a characterization from California—linguistic land's end—melting pot of southern drawl and northern twang—domain of golden misnomers and mangled metaphors—is instructive, but do not dismay.
For much of the previous century, a pocketbook/pocket book was a kind of wallet that could be folded and generally snapped shut, then deposited—i.e., nested—inside a purse. Inside were kept frequently used things of value such as coins and bills (hence the connection with money) and personal identification; plus whatever small flat items (charge cards, as they were then called) which were desired not to float around inside the purse (not bag).
The pocket book, or the book pocket, was a kind of “safe pocket” that could exist apart from any pant, vest, or coat; or even from the purse or pocket where it normally resided. It was as if the word for a close-able wallet had an interior and exterior meaning: inward pocket for retention and retrieval of quick cash; outward appearance of a locking, or at least closable, book.
In those days, people quite often also carried a savings account deposit-withdrawal register, called a passbook, which could fit in a pocketbook. (Are you seeing the picture... of having money, ID, coin and bill, and coin & bill receptacle all in one place at a bank counter...?)
The term, pocketbook, was so ubiquitous it came to have a broader meaning, mostly associated with the carrying of money in general, be it in a purse or in a pocket (as in, within a man's wallet). So the term came to be used in either instance: a woman's or a man's purse or pocket-borne receptacle, respectively, for carrying money. It also came to be used not only for the concealed "book," but also for the containing purse as well. In short, one's pocket book became synonymous with ones carry-around money itself.
Not surprising, then, that pocketbook could also come to represent, almost euphemistically, the very thing it is purposed to accommodate: money. In the introductory question, there is meaning between the lines that, with Teutonic paucity of words, alludes to a Germany so rich from the postwar re-emergence of its pre-war industrial might, that by comparison with neighboring Euro Community countries, it can be thought of in terms of guiltily subsidizing (and not nationalistically destroying) Europe from an economic wealth building capacity so large as to suggest that the cohesion of Europe depends on only the relatively small proportion of treasure "carried about" (as if) in that nation's cache of loose change: its pocket book. In other words, the allusion to the German pocketbook is a way of saying the country's underlying wealth producing capacity is far greater still.
Interestingly enough (back here in the States), the beginning of the end of "pocketbook" universality happened at about the same time as women's pant's zippers moved from the back to the front - pockets and wallets in; purses and pocketbooks out.
Suffice it to say, pocketbook, is also a short hand way of talking about yours or another person's money on hand without using the word money. Accordingly, there was similarly a measure of status in the use of or speaking about pocketbooks, as opposed to merely carrying/jangling money loosely, or in a wallet, in the pocket or in the purse. Billfolds were blue collar; pocketbooks white collar.
Californian or not, you can take some comfort in the knowledge that there was a time when your bewilderment about misnomers was shared by all curious-minded persons in the passage into adulthood. By the measure of at least one, children in numbers must have wondered about that mysterious thing their parents called a pocketbook, without ever seeing a book going into or coming out of pocket.
Americans are the most notorious corruptors of the English language. Perhaps we did this early on just to be part of our defiance to the Crown. We say things and refer to things in an "Americanized" way with usually no thought whatsoever to etymology or respect for traditional English usage, or even seem to care why we call things what we do.
Calling a purse or a handbag a "pocketbook" is an example of this. The women I posed this query to laughed, thought it was a good joke, and then they accused me of being a stupid and simple-minded man. If I were to present them with research and facts tomorrow, it would become an even greater opportunity for laughter.
It makes sense in a nonsensical way. Since "pocketbook" was already in usage and was something people were familiar with, then why take the risk of making-up another term to more correctly identify what you were talking about? Call it a pocketbook and people have an idea of what you're talking about without having to go through the trouble and time of making an explanation to those who would accuse you of being vague or ridiculous.
The term "pocket-book" in recent times have been defined to mean a woman's purse. However, this definition is unprecedented. The word has been used just to refer to something that holds money, checks, and bills, and notes, as well as being a diary.
Originally from the 1610s, a small book meant to be carried in one’s pocket, from pocket + book. Meaning “a booklike leather folder for papers, bills, etc.” is from 1722.
A pocket-book does not refer to a woman's purse only. Dickens in his book Great Expectations referred to men using pocketbooks as well. He also referred to men using pocket-books in A Tale of Two Cities.
Not only is the use of pocket-books by men recorded in fiction only, but also historical accounts, in which a story was told about the author Jules Verne(1828-1905) searching his pocketbook.
The definition for a pocketbook as a woman's purse is unascertained.
