A filing cabinet (or file cabinet in American English) is a piece of office furniture usually used to store paper documents in file folders. In the most simple sense, it is an enclosure for drawers in which items are stored. The two most common forms of filing cabinets are lateral files and vertical files. A vertical file cabinet has drawers that extend from the short side (typically 15 inches) of the cabinet. A lateral file cabinet has drawers that extend from the long side (various lengths) of the cabinet. These are also called side filers in Great Britain. There are also lateral files and shelf files. In the United States, file cabinets are usually built to accommodate 8.5 x 11 paper, and in other countries, filing cabinets are often designed to hold other sizes of paper, such as A4 paper.
