Filing cabinet



A filing cabinet (or sometimes file cabinet in American English) was a piece of Terran office furniture usually used to store paper documents in file folders. In the most simple context, it was an enclosure for drawers in which items were stored. The two most common forms of filing cabinets were vertical files and lateral files. A vertical filing cabinet had drawers that extended from the short side (typically 38.1 cm) of the cabinet. A lateral filing cabinet had drawers that extended from the long side (various lengths) of the cabinet. These were also called side filers in Great Britain. There were also shelf files, which went on shelves. In the United States, filing cabinets were usually built to accommodate 8.5 in × 11 in  (215.9 x 279.4 mm) paper, and in other countries, filing cabinets were often designed to hold other sizes of paper, such as A4 paper (210 x 297 mm).