A drawer is an open-topped box that slides in and out, while a cabinet is the larger piece of furniture, with doors or drawers, that holds it. In short: the drawer is a part, and the cabinet is often the whole.
The core difference
A drawer is a sliding storage box, while a cabinet is the furniture unit, fitted with doors or drawers, that a drawer can be part of.
- drawer — an open-topped box that slides in and out of the cabinet or unit that contains it: She pulled open the top drawer to find a spare set of keys.
- cabinet — a piece of furniture with doors or drawers used for storage or display: She kept the good china in a glass-fronted cabinet.
- cabinet — also the senior group of ministers or advisors who help run a government: The prime minister reshuffled her cabinet after the election.
How to tell them apart
A useful way to keep the two straight is that a cabinet is the container and a drawer is one of the things that can be inside it. Many cabinets have drawers, but not all storage with drawers is called a cabinet, and not every cabinet has drawers at all — some just have doors, like a glass-fronted display cabinet.
Cabinet comes from "cabin" plus the diminutive suffix "-et", shaped by the similar French word cabinet. The political sense of cabinet, meaning a government's senior advisors, grew from the same root's original meaning of "a small private room", much as "salon" took its name from a meeting room.
