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Piggy bank (sometimes penny bank or money box) is the traditional name of a coin container usually used by children. The piggy bank is known to collectors as a "still bank" as opposed to the "mechanical banks" popular in the early 20th century. These items are also often used by corporations for promotional purposes. The use of the name 'piggy bank' gave rise to its widely-recognized 'pig' shape, and many financial services companies use piggy banks as logos for their savings products. Piggy banks are typically made of ceramic or porcelain. They are generally painted and serve as a pedagogical device to teach the rudiments of thrift and savings to children; money can be easily inserted. Many piggy banks have a rubber plug located on the underside; others are made of vinyl and have a removable nose for easy coin access. Some incorporate electronic systems which calculate the amount of money deposited.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=DigiBank Piggy and Panda Banks Learn to Count )〕 Some piggy banks have no opening besides the slot for inserting coins, which will lead to smashing the piggy bank with a hammer or by other means, to obtain the money within. ==Etymology== Pygg is an orange colored clay commonly used during the Middle Ages as a cheap material for pots to store money, called pygg pots or pygg jars.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The Accidental Invention: The Origin Of Piggy Banks )〕 There is dispute as to whether "pygg" was simply a dialectal variant of "pig."〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Piggy Banks )〕 By the 18th century, the term "pig jar" had evolved to "pig bank".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=What's the origin of the piggy bank? )〕 As earthenware was supplanted by other materials, such as glass, plaster, and plastic, the name gradually began to refer specifically to the shape of the bank, instead of what was used to make it. The oldest find of a money box dates from 2nd century BC Greek colony Priene, Asia Minor, and features the shape of a little Greek temple with a slit in the pediment. Money boxes of various forms were also excavated in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and appear quite frequently on late ancient provincial sites, particularly in Roman Britain and along the Rhine.〔Hurschmann, Rolf (Hamburg): "Money boxes", Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider (ed.): ''New Pauly'', Brill, 2009〕 The Javanese and Indonesian term ''cèlèngan'' (literally "likeness of a wild boar",〔A ''cèlèng'' is a wild boar, with the "an" affix used to denote a likeness〕 but used to mean both "savings" and "piggy bank") is also used in the context of domestic banks. The etymology of the word is obscure, but evident in a Majapahit piggy bank from the 15th century. Several boar-shaped piggy banks have been discovered at the large archaeological site surrounding Trowulan, a village in the Indonesian province of East Java and possible site of the capital of the ancient Majapahit Empire. These are probably the source of the Javanese-Indonesian word referring to savings or money containers. Another Javanese-Indonesian synonym for savings is ''tabungan'', which derives from the word for "tube" or "cylinder". This arises from another method of making coin containers by using a portion of enclosed bamboo segment completed with a slit into which coins are inserted. One important Majapahit piggy bank specimen is housed at the National Museum of Indonesia. It has been reconstructed, as this large piggy bank was found broken into pieces. Majapahit terracotta coin containers have been found in a variety of shapes, including tubes, jars and boxes, each with a slit into which to insert coins. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「piggy bank」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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