/ˈsænwɪdʒ/
[noun] Two pieces of bread with a filling such as meat, cheese, or vegetables placed between them. The word is also used more generally for anything layered between two flat pieces of something.
The sandwich is named after a man who supposedly ate meat between bread so he wouldn't have to leave his gambling table.
Few words carry the fingerprints of a single moment — and a single person — as clearly as 'sandwich.' The word is named after John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, an eighteenth-century British nobleman who lived from 1718 to 1792. According to the most popular story, the Earl was so devoted to gambling that he refused to leave the card table for meals. Instead, he asked his servants to bring him slices of cold roast beef placed between two pieces of bread, so he could eat with one hand and play cards with the other. His fellow gamblers, impressed by the convenience, began ordering 'the same as Sandwich,' and the name stuck.
The place name 'Sandwich' itself is far older than the Earl, stretching back to the Anglo-Saxon period of English history. The town of Sandwich in the county of Kent, England, appears in written records as early as 664 AD. Its name comes from the Old English words 'sand,' meaning sand, and 'wic,' meaning a trading settlement or dwelling place — so Sandwich simply meant 'sandy market town.' The town was one of the original Cinque Ports, a group of key harbour towns on the southeastern English coast, and was an important centre of trade for centuries before anyone thought to put meat between two slices of bread.
The first written record of the word 'sandwich' used to describe food appears in the diary of Edward Gibbon, the famous historian who wrote 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.' In a journal entry from 1762, Gibbon described seeing two dozen noblemen dining on 'a bit of cold meat, or a Sandwich.' This gives us a remarkably precise starting point — the mid-eighteenth century — for a word that is now used billions of times a day around the world. It is rare for historians to be able to trace a common everyday word to such a specific moment and source.
Whether the gambling story is entirely true is a matter of some debate. Historians have pointed out that the Earl of Sandwich was actually a hard-working government official — he served as First Lord of the Admiralty — and it is just as likely that he ate his bread-and-meat combination at his desk, not his card table. The gambling version of the story was recorded by a French writer named Pierre-Jean Grosley, who visited London in 1765 and reported it as something he had heard. It may be that the dramatic, card-playing image was simply a better story, and so it was the one that survived.
What makes the word 'sandwich' linguistically remarkable is how freely it has grown beyond its original meaning. From a noun, it became a verb — 'to sandwich something in' means to squeeze it tightly between two other things or events. We speak of a 'sandwich course' in British education, where study periods are sandwiched between periods of work experience. We have club sandwiches, open sandwiches, and even 'sandwich boards,' the signs worn around a person's body with a board hanging in front and one behind. The word has also leapt into other languages almost unchanged: French, German, Spanish, and Japanese all use versions of 'sandwich.' In this way, a Kent harbour town, a gambling nobleman, and a practical solution to hunger at the card table gave the world one of its most widely shared and instantly understood words.