No man is an iland

Photo by Tom Winckels on Unsplash

A Wordlady reader has asked about the silent s in "island".

The s is an interloper.

Way back in Anglo-Saxon, the word was ígland, íland. The first syllable was derived from a word meaning ‘of or pertaining to water’, ‘watery’, and thus an íland was a ‘watery place, land surrounded by water’. Iland came to be the most common spelling in the Middle English period, and indeed survived until the 1600s, appearing in both the King James Bible and Paradise Lost.

But meanwhile the French arrived with their synonymous ile (in Modern French spelled île). Of course being English we decided to keep both the Anglo-Saxon word and the French one.

Ile was derived, with much French squishing, from Latin insula. In the 1400s and 1500s the French had a little flutter with Latinizing spellings and silent letters, so they started to spell it isle. But they smartened up and by the end of the 19th century settled on the modern spelling île, with the circumflex indicating the missing s (which they needn't have reinserted in the first place, but never mind).

Iland, meanwhile, as we have seen, had no historical connection to the Latin insula. But that didn't stop us from messing with the spelling. If ile comes from insula, then iland must too, and we'd better stick a silent s in both of them to show it. 

In the 1500s we started to do that, and by 1700 "island" and "isle" became the only correct spellings.

I suppose we should be grateful that we didn't end up with "insland".

For other words where the silent letter is based on false etymology, see ptarmigan and gyrfalcon. 

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