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Etymology

Dirichlet published his works in both French and German, using either the German Schubfach or the French tiroir. The strict original meaning of these terms corresponds to the English drawer, that is, an open-topped box that can be slid in and out of the cabinet that contains it. (Dirichlet wrote about distributing pearls among drawers.) These terms morphed to pigeonhole in the sense of a small open space in a desk, cabinet, or wall for keeping letters or papers, metaphorically rooted in structures that house pigeons.

Because furniture with pigeonholes is commonly used for storing or sorting things into many categories (such as letters in a post office or room keys in a hotel), the translation pigeonhole may be a better rendering of Dirichlet's original "drawer". That understanding of the term pigeonhole, referring to some furniture features, is fading—especially among those who do not speak English natively but as a lingua franca in the scientific world—in favor of the more pictorial interpretation, literally involving pigeons and holes. The suggestive (though not misleading) interpretation of "pigeonhole" as " dovecote " has lately found its way back to a German back-translation of the "pigeonhole principle" as the " Taubenschlagprinzip ".

Besides the original terms " Schubfachprinzip " in German and " Principe des tiroirs " in French, other literal translations are still in use in Arabic ("مبدأ برج الحمام"), Bulgarian (" принцип на чекмеджетата "), Chinese (" 抽屉原理 "), Danish (" Skuffeprincippet "), Dutch (" ladenprincipe "), Hungarian (" skatulyaelv "), Italian (" principio dei cassetti "), Japanese (" 引き出し論法 "), Persian (" اصل لانه کبوتری "), Polish (" zasada szufladkowa "), Portuguese (" Princípio das Gavetas "), Swedish (" Lådprincipen "), Turkish (" çekmece ilkesi "), and Vietnamese (" nguyên lý hộp ").