The sandwich is named after a town, by way of a man who probably did not invent it.
Sandwich is a port in Kent, one of the medieval Cinque Ports. Its Old English name, Sandwicæ, means roughly "sandy harbor" or "sandy trading place." The town gave its name to an earldom, and in the 18th century the earl was John Montagu, who lived from 1718 to 1792.
The earliest known use of the food word comes from the historian Edward Gibbon. In a 1762 entry in his journal, he described leading men of the kingdom at the Cocoa Tree club, supping "upon a bit of cold meat, or a Sandwich." The word was already casual enough to need no explanation.
The story of how it got that name came later and secondhand. The French writer Pierre-Jean Grosley visited London in 1765 and published an account in 1770. He described a minister who spent a whole day at the gaming table, eating beef between slices of toasted bread without stopping play. The dish, Grosley wrote, took the name of the man who thought of it.
That is gossip, not a record. Grosley did not name his source, and he was writing years after the word was established. Montagu's biographer N. A. M. Rodger offers a duller alternative. Montagu was busy with the navy, politics and the arts, so he more likely ate his bread and beef at his desk. That theory has a problem of its own: Wordorigins.org points out that Montagu was out of government in 1762. It concludes that the earl is the only plausible namesake, but the circumstances are uncertain.
What is certain is that he did not invent the idea. Hillel the Elder, a Jewish sage of the first century BC, is said to have wrapped Passover lamb and bitter herbs in matzah. Medieval diners ate off slabs of bread called trenchers. In the 17th century the naturalist John Ray watched Dutch tavern-goers lay thin slices of beef on buttered bread.
The earl's contribution was his title. His name also landed elsewhere. Captain James Cook named the Sandwich Islands after him in 1778, when Montagu ran the Admiralty. Those islands are now Hawaii.
The word kept working after the earl was gone. "Sandwich board," for the pair of placards worn front and back, dates to 1864. The verb, to squeeze something between two others, followed in the 19th century.