Old English īegland, from īeg 'island' (from a base meaning 'watery, watered') + land. The change in the spelling of the first syllable in the 16th century was due to association with the unrelated word isle.

• In spite of their similarity of form and meaning, island and isle (Middle English) are completely unrelated. The first is a native English word, with parallels in early forms of other north European languages, whereas the second came through French from Latin in medieval times. The first part of Old English īegland is īeg ‘island’, from a root meaning ‘watery’. People wrongly associated it with isle, and in the 16th century changed the spelling accordingly. In fact there was no ‘s’ in isle in the Middle Ages either: it was spelled ile, as it was in French at the time of its adoption. In the 15th century both French and English people connected the word—this time correctly—with Latin insula, and added the ‘s’. See also insular, peninsula. The English poet and preacher John Donne (1572–1631) memorably expressed the view that the lives and fates of humans are interconnected in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624): ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main;…any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ Isolated (mid 18th century) is related to isle, coming from Latin insulatus ‘made into an island’.