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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Allen S. Moore" data-source="post: 1301630" data-attributes="member: 22662">Sancho,Your derivation of the word "island" coincides well with the derivation in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary that I have (1976 edition) except that it gives the root as Old English, which would have been much more like Old Norse than, say, Modern English and Norwegian.There is an interesting derivation of the name Ireland's Eye in Wikipedia, which I shall not copy here. It says that the "Eye" part of the name is derived from the Old Norse Ey, an island. Isn't it Ireland's Eye that has a gannet colony? That reminds me of what to me is one of the mysteries of ornithology, why academics or whoever changed the scientific name of gannets to Morus or whatever and kept Sula for boobies. The connection of the name Sula with gannets seems to be ancient as far as Scotland is concerned, with Sula Sgeir in the Western Isles and Sule Stack in Orkney both having gannet colonies. There is no such logic as far as Morus is concerned!Allen</blockquote>