Why is the Isle of Wight Called the Isle of Wight?

The exact origin of the name "Isle of Wight" is unknown, lost as it is to time. The "Isle" part is fairly obvious, but it's the "Wight" that people get stuck on. There are many stories about how it got its name, some of them plausible, some of them likely, some of them sounding plausible until research is done, and some of them just being outright silly. This article will cover some of the more likely ideas, though it will also state which of these are wrong, even though they are fairly widespread ideas.

The first is that the island is called the "Isle of Wight" because of the white cliffs that surround it, raising it above the sea. In this version of the name's origin, "Wight" is just an alternate or old spelling of "White". This is incorrect though. The island does have white cliffs, but they did not contribute to its name (at least, their colour didn't). Although the sound is very similar to the "hwit" that meant "white" in Old English, the spelling would have followed that of the rest of the country, becoming either "wite" or "white", rather than "wight".

The second, also incorrect idea, is that it is because the island used to be called the isle of "wiht" in Old English, which was the Old English word for creatures, and so, as the spelling and pronunciation changed, so did the spelling of the Isle of Wight, becoming what it is today. This is also most likely incorrect as there would be no reason to differentiate the island as creature filled, given that its ecology was much the same as the south of Britain in general.

The two most likely explanations are that it is a combination of various names that were given to it. The first possibility is that the Beaker people, named after their distinctive pottery, who arrived on the island in 1900BC called the island "Wiht" which meant "raised" in their language, probably due to the island's appearance of sharply rising out of the sea. This, along with the Celtic word "gywth", meaning channel, combined to form an amalgamation of the two, "the raised section of the channel", which would have been essentially the "wight" we know today. The island is located in the British Channel, between Britain and France, so this makes a lot of sense.

The other explanation is that in 400BC, Iron Age Celts gave the island its name of Wight, which meant a place of divisision, because it is between the two outstretching "arms" of land that make up the solent. If this explanation is true, it's one of the very few Celtic names still in existence in Britain.

This article was written by Tom Sangers for St Maur, an Isle of Wight hotel that offers an Isle of Wight holiday.