Isle of Dogs - Etymology

Etymology

The name Isle of Dogs is first recorded in 1588 (see hereafter), but had been in use for some years before this. Brewer's 1898 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable attributes the name: "So called from being the receptacle of the greyhounds of Edward III. Some say it is a corruption of the Isle of Ducks, and that it is so called in ancient records from the number of wild fowl inhabiting the marshes." Other sources discount this, believing these stories to all derive from the antiquarian John Strype, and believe it might come from one of the following:

• a nickname of contempt; it was a "dog's life" for anyone forced to live on it. Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson wrote a satirical play in 1597 titled The Isle of Dogs. Samuel Pepys referred to the "unlucky Isle of Dogs."
• the presence of Dutch engineers reclaiming the land from a disastrous flood;
• the presence of gibbets on the foreshore facing Greenwich;
• the fact that dead dogs were often washed up on the banks of the Thames at this location
• a yeoman farmer called Brache, this being an old word for a type of hunting dog;
• the dogs of a later king, Henry VIII, who also kept deer in Greenwich Park. Again it is thought that his hunting dogs might have been kept in derelict farm buildings on the Island.
• Literately the Isle of Dykes, which then got corrupted over the years.