{"id":6476,"date":"2012-01-05T16:54:57","date_gmt":"2012-01-05T16:54:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=6476"},"modified":"2012-01-05T16:54:57","modified_gmt":"2012-01-05T16:54:57","slug":"purses-and-sporrans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=6476","title":{"rendered":"Purses and sporrans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The word <strong>purse<\/strong> has an interesting history, I discovered today. It comes from the Old English word <em>purs<\/em>, from the Late Latin word <em>bursa<\/em>, which had a number of meanings of the centuries, including skin or leather; (money) bag; scrotum; exchange; and scholarship, allowance, and comes from the Greek word <em>\u03b2\u03cd\u03c1\u03c3\u03b1<\/em> (hide, leather). <\/p>\n<p><strong>bursa<\/strong> is also the root of bursar, bursary, purser and reimburse; and of words for purse in the Celtic languages: <em>spar\u00e1n<\/em> (Irish) <em>sporan<\/em> (Scottish Gaelic), <em>sporran<\/em> (Manx), as well as the French word <em>bourse<\/em> (grant, purse, stock market, stock exchange), the Spanish word <em>bolsa<\/em> (bag, exchange, stock exchange, pocket, purse), and of similar words in quite a few other languages.<\/p>\n<p>In British English purse usually refers to a small container used, mainly women, to keep their money, credit cards, etc in &#8211; British men generally carry their money in their pockets and\/or in a wallet. What do Americans carry their money in?<\/p>\n<p>In American English purse generally refers to a bag used to keep money, keys and other essentials in, especially by women &#8211; also known as a pocketbook (?). The British English equivalent the American purse is a handbag. <\/p>\n<p><em>Sources: <a href=\"http:\/\/oed.com\/view\/Entry\/155036?rskey=VJwvab&#038;result=1&#038;isAdvanced=false#eid\">OED<\/a>, Dictionary of Word Origins, <a href=\"http:\/\/dictionary.cambridge.org\/dictionary\/american-english\/purse_1?q=purse\">Cambridge Dictionaries Online<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The word purse has an interesting history, I discovered today. It comes from the Old English word purs, from the Late Latin word bursa, which had a number of meanings of the centuries, including skin or leather; (money) bag; scrotum; exchange; and scholarship, allowance, and comes from the Greek word \u03b2\u03cd\u03c1\u03c3\u03b1 (hide, leather). bursa is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,111,127,10,15,23,56,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-french","category-irish","category-language","category-latin","category-manx","category-scottish-gaelic","category-spanish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}