Ireland

The name Ireland goes back through Old English Īrland (land of the Īras, the Irish people) to a Proto-Celtic goddess name that predates written record by centuries. The oldest attested form is Ériu, one of three divine sisters in Irish mythology who personified the island itself. Greek mariners around 300 BCE knew the island as Iérnē; the Romans called it Hibernia. Both Ériu and Hibernia descend from the same Proto-Celtic root, reconstructed as Φīwerjū.

The Proto-Celtic root behind Ériu is reconstructed as Φīwerjū or Ēwerijō, from a Proto-Indo-European root connected to abundance or fertility. Julius Pokorny, in his 1959 etymological dictionary of Indo-European languages, connected this root to Sanskrit pīvan (fat, fertile) and Greek pion (rich, abundant). The reading of Ireland's name as the fat land or the fertile island follows from Pokorny's analysis. The derivation of Ériu and Hibernia from the same pre-Latin source is not disputed, even where the deeper PIE connection remains a matter of debate.

Old Norse speakers called the Irish Írar, adapting Ériu, and Old English speakers borrowed this as Īras. The compound Īrland, meaning land of the Íras, appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle by the 9th century. Norman scribes after 1066 rendered it Irland and Irlande. By the 14th century, Middle English had settled on Ireland, and this spelling appears in administrative documents of the English crown governing the island.

The Latin Hibernia survived in scholarly and ecclesiastical writing well into the 18th century, running in parallel with Ireland through English literature. Edmund Spenser used Ireland throughout A View of the Present State of Ireland in 1596. Swift and Burke wrote about Ireland with the name fully naturalized. The Old English compound Īras + land is unusual among island names because it centers the people rather than the geography, a choice that preserved a goddess's name inside a political designation for over a thousand years.