A savings account is a deposit account held at a retail bank that pays interest but cannot be used directly as money in the narrow sense of a medium of exchange (for example, by writing a cheque). These accounts let customers set aside a portion of their liquid assets while earning a monetary return.
The other major types of deposit accounts are the transactional account (usually known as a "checking" (US) or "current" (UK) account), money market account and time deposit.