Shakespeare wrote about tinkers carrying leather bags called budgets.
Budget entered English around 1432 as bouget, meaning a leather pouch or small bag, borrowed from the Old French bougette, the diminutive of bouge, a leather wallet.1 The French word traced back to the Latin bulga, meaning leather bag, which was itself of Gaulish origin, related to the Old Irish bolg, meaning bag.2
For two centuries in English, a budget was simply a container. Travelers, messengers, and peddlers carried budgets. Shakespeare wrote of tinkers who "bear the sow-skin budget." The word referred to the object, not its contents.
The shift to its financial meaning came through a specific ritual. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer presented the government's fiscal plans to Parliament, the phrase used was "opening the budget," referring to the leather bag in which the documents were carried.3 By 1733, the word had transferred from the bag to the plans inside it. A budget was no longer a pouch. It was a statement of expected income and expenditure.
The same Latin root bulga also produced the English words bulge, originally meaning a bag, and bilge, the lowest part of a ship's hull, where foul water collected.
The financial sense of budget spread from government to business to household management. By the twentieth century, budgeting had become the central discipline of corporate planning, the annual budget cycle absorbing weeks of organizational effort each year.
The Proto-Indo-European root *bhelgh-, meaning "to swell," connects budget to an even older family of words about expansion and containment. The Gaulish bag, the parliamentary pouch, and the corporate spending plan all descended from the same image of something swelling outward from a boundary meant to contain it.