Drawer

A drawer is a box that lives inside a piece of furniture and comes out when pulled. It is a shelf that has learned to hide, and a cupboard that only opens towards you.^[1]

Drawers stick when they are full and slide out completely when they are empty, a behaviour furniture scientists call the Drawer Principle: a drawer will always move in the opposite manner to the one you were expecting.

The other drawer

Every home contains one drawer that holds everything that does not belong in any other drawer. It knows what it contains by knowing what the other drawers contain, and then taking everything else. In this way it is the only drawer whose contents are defined entirely by the absence of a reason.^[2]

A full inventory of one such drawer, carried out in 2004 by the Household Contents Survey over three days, recorded:

• One key, to nothing.
• Four rubber bands, holding nothing together.
• Two batteries, of uncertain loyalty.
• A takeaway menu for a restaurant that has since become a different restaurant.
• A pen that works only when the shopping list is already finished.

The survey team noted that the drawer was more difficult to close after the inventory than before it, although nothing had been added.

Chest of drawers

A chest of drawers is not a chest. It is a stack of drawers that has been given a name implying a single lid, and which has never had one. Etymologists have described this as "one of the more confident names in furniture".

See also

• Bookshelf – a drawer that stopped hiding
• Sock – usually found in a drawer, separately
• Fridge – contains a drawer, which contains a vegetable, eventually
• Coat hanger – the wardrobe's other storage system
• List of things that are empty – a list drawers keep trying to leave

References

1. Runner, R. (1999). Out, In, Stuck. Cabinet Press. p. 1 (folded).
2. Household Contents Survey (2004). "The Other Drawer: Three Days In". Appendix still in the drawer.
3. Handle, H. (2011). "The Drawer Principle". Journal of Unexpected Furniture 6.