This is origins in five. Five minutes, one word, a small story to start the day. Today's word is island. An island can be a wonderful place, sandy beaches, a nice breeze from the ocean, and maybe a few tropical drinks. Now as you're sitting on the beach, taking in the breeze, sipping on your drink, I bet you never thought of the following question. Why does the word island have an S in it? It's not something you can pronounce, and it doesn't seem all that necessary. Well that's the question we're going to answer in this episode. Let's start our journey in the twelfth century. During that time the old English word for island was Eagland. That's I G L A N D. Now the root IG Eg is related to the Old Norse A spelled EY and means thing on the water. Now this makes sense. An island is nothing if not a thing on the water. As the centuries progressed, the word spelling changed slightly. In Middle English it was spelled I L A N D or Y L A N D, but it was pretty much pronounced the same way. So originally for hundreds of years, the word had no S whatsoever. But then things got messy, and they got messy because of something called false etymology. That is when people reshape a word based on what they think its origin is rather than what it actually is. And that's what happened here. In the 1500s, scholars mistakenly thought island was related to the French word isle, which was derived from the Latin word insula, INSULA. Now a quick aside about the Latin word insula. We often talk about Latin as having a singular meaning for a given word. And in Old Latin, the word insula did in fact refer to an island, a piece of land completely surrounded by water. But even in ancient times, words were repurposed. In the Middle Roman Empire, which is around the 3rd to 2nd century BCE, as Rome's population exploded, multi-story apartment blocks were built to house the poor and middle class. Romans began using the word insula to describe these specific city blocks. According to some historians, a single insula was a rectangular plot of land entirely surrounded by four public streets. As such, the roads flowed around these massive apartment blocks like water flowing around an island. Now, back to our story about the word island and the mysterious addition of the S. As I mentioned before RSI, people assumed that English Island must be related to the French word Isle. So they did what people sometimes do when they think they know better than history. They changed the word. They added an S, even though it didn't belong there, even though it never been there, and even though it was never pronounced. And just like that, Island I L A N D became Island I S L A N D. A spelling mistake that stuck. A silent letter added by accident preserved for centuries. So the next time you write ILN, remember, the S is a misunderstanding. It was never supposed to be there in the first place. And that's origins in five. One word, one story to start your day.