Photo, c.1912, of a man and two women strolling down a city street eating hot dogs. Two men and a ladder are in the background. The photo is labeled, “Hot Dog,” Coney.
6 September 2021
(Revised 8 September 2021, adding the possible Indigenous origins of the name Coney Island)
The word coney is from the Anglo-Norman conin (rabbit), which is attested in the thirteenth century. The French word comes from the classical Latin cuniculus (rabbit, tunnel/burrow). There are no native Germanic or Celtic cognates for the word, and those cognates that exist in those languages today are borrowings from either English or Anglo-Norman.
Strangely, rabbits in Britain are something of an archeological anomaly. Rabbits were native to Britain in prehistoric times but there is no evidence of them being on the islands after the last ice age, evidence for them reappearing in the early thirteenth century. This is odd, because rabbits were a dietary staple of English peasantry in the later Middle Ages. (They were one of the few sources of meat readily available to commoners.) Rabbits were also commonly farmed by the Romans, so one would think there would have been husbandry of rabbits in Roman and post-Roman Britain, but there is no evidence of this being the case.
As a result, there is no Old English word for rabbit, but there is one anomalous word appearing in an Old English charter that may be related. The toponym Conigrave can be found in a description of territorial boundaries in a 936 C.E. land grant:
On radanforde þanen endlang brokes on conigraue est and nortward þanen, on rigte to Wedergrave.
(To red-ford then along the brook to the northeast part of coneygrove then straight on to sheep[?]-grove.)
Conigrave may be a post-Conquest scribal error for *comgrave (coomb-grove), with the scribe misreading the < m > as < ni >—minim confusion is a common scribal error—or perhaps it could be place where domesticated rabbits were kept, either an addition by a later scribe—the surviving manuscripts are copies from the fourteenth century—or perhaps the sole scrap of evidence that there were rabbits in Britain at the time.
Coney doesn’t appear in English until the twelfth century, and then it is in reference to the animal’s fur, not the animal itself. From a passage in a homiletic poem that gives a description of heaven, saying there are no worldly luxuries there.
Ne sal þar ben foh, ne grai, ne cunin, ne ermine
Ne aquerne ne metheschele ne beuer ne sabeline.
Ne sal þer ben naðer scat ne srud ne wereldes well none.(There shall be no variegated, nor gray, nor coney, nor ermine [furs], nor squirrel-fur, nor marten fur, nor beaver, nor sable-fur. There shall be neither sheet nor shroud nor any of the world’s wealth.)
The use of coney to refer to the animal itself is recorded in the early fourteenth century. It is used in a political poem, a pun on the name of Pieter de Coninck, a Flemish weaver and leader of a peasant revolt against French rule (1323–28):
We shule flo þe Conyng, and make roste is loyne;
þe word shal springen of him in-to coloyne,
so hit shal to Acres, & in-to sesoyne,
ant maken him ful wan.(We shall flay the Coney and roast his loin; the message of him shall carry to Cologne, so it shall go to Acre, and into Saxony and make him very pale.)
That’s where coney comes from. But to Americans, at least to those from the greater New York City metropolitan area, coney may be chiefly known through Coney Island. The western portion of the beach resort in Brooklyn has been at times an island, and at other times the channel silted up, connecting it to the rest of the peninsula that is now Coney Island. The origin of the name is uncertain. It was called by the Dutch Conyne Eylant (rabbit island), but whether it was so named because of rabbits who lived there or if that is a Dutch variation on an Indigenous place name is the question.
Detail of a copy of a 1639 Dutch map marking the location of Conyné Eylant (lower left)
The Dutch name Conyne Eylant appears on the Manatus map, a 1670 copy of what is believed to be a map from 1639. That map also marks a Munsee village named Techkonis. It is possible that the -konis element of that name was transferred to Coney Island. But nothing is known of this village—this map is the only known reference to the village. The village would have been either purchased by the Dutch in the early 1640s and the inhabitants forced out or they would have been massacred by the Dutch in Kieft’s War (1643–45). (Some sources on the web credit the name to an alleged Munsee band known as the Konoh or Konoi, meaning bear. This claim would seem to arise from the village of Techkonis, but since nothing other than its name is known of this village, no more can be said of it. If there was such a band, the name would not translate as “bear.”)
In English, the name Conyne Island appears as early as 7 May 1654 in a deed conveying right to the island from the Lenape to English settlers living in Gravesend, across the channel on Long Island:
Gravesend, May the seventh, 1654. Certain Indians, viz., Mattenoh, Sachemacko of Niocko being demanded against a certain parcel of land, viz. a neck of land from Antonie Johnson’s house southward and on Island called Conye Island, to whom it did belong unto, they did all declare that it was to their knowledge the right and true proper land of Guttaquoh, and called by them Narriockh, that is to say, the Island; and the neck of land is called by them Manahanung, and in testimony of the premises have hereunto set their hands.
From this deed, it appears that Narriockh is the western tip of what is now Coney Island, in 1654 a separate island, and the remainder was known to the Munsee as Manahanung. The existence of these Munsee names militates against, but does not eliminate, the possibility of Coney Island having some kind of Indigenous origin. Some sources translate Narriockh as “land of light” or “land of no shadow,” but this translation appears to be spurious.
Another explanation is that the name Coney comes from a member of Henry Hudson’s crew, John Colman, who was killed there in 1609. Colman did indeed die on Coney Island, but nothing connects him with the name. Others suggest the name derives from a Dutch surname of settlers there, but no evidence for this conjecture has been put forth.
The spelling Coney Island appears by 1685 in George Scot’s The Model of the Government of the Province of East-New-Jersey in America:
Richard Hartshorn hath a Plantation, with considerable Land belonging to it, part within, and part without Sandy Hook, which with a part of Coney Island, and Long Island opposite to it, makes the entrance into the Bay that goes up to Now-York [sic], and also to the Lands of East-New-Jersey.
Coney Island is famous for its hot dogs, and that delicacy has been variously called a Coney Island, a Coney Island dog, a Coney Island hot dog, and simply a Coney dog. This appellation goes back to at least 1895 when it appears in the 6 September issue of the Syracuse Daily Standard in an article about health inspections of meat-packing plants:
The city meat inspector said that he had twice a week made the rounds of the market but the only thing he had found out of the way was one carcass of beef that he had had thrown away. This meat has been sold to a sausage maker and would have been all [bound] up into red hot Coney Islands had it not been for the city’s officer.
Despite the name, perhaps the one thing that hot dogs have never been accused of containing is rabbit meat.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. conin.
Birch, Walter de Gray. “Carta Regis Athelstan de Merksburi” (Birch 709). Cartularium Saxonicum, vol. 2 of 3. London: Whiting, 1887, 416. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
Fein, Susanna Greer, David Raybin, Jan Ziolkowski, eds. “Art. 48, Lustneth, Lordinges, Bothe Yonge Ant Olde.” The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2 of 3. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, lines 69–72.
Grumet, Robert S. The Munsee Indians: A History. Civilization of the American Indian 262. Norman, Oklahoma: U of Oklahoma Press, 2009, 51, 63.
Kelly, S.E. Charters of Glastonbury Abbey. Anglo-Saxon Charters 15. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012, 355–58.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. coning, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, modified June 2021, s.v. coney, n.1; modified September 2020, s.v. Coney Island, n., Coney dog, n.2.
Purchase of Meadow and Upland (The Deed to Coney Island), 7 May 1654. New York City Department of Records and Information Services.
Robbins, Rossell Hope, ed. “The Flemish Insurrection.” Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries. New York: Columbia UP, 1959, lines 69–72, 11. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Harley MS 2253.
Scot, George. The Model of the Government of the Province of East-New-Jersey in America. Edinburgh: John Reid, 1685, 130. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Stiles, Henry R. The Civil, Political, Professional, and Ecclesiastical History and Commercial and Industrial Record of the County of Kings and the City of Brooklyn, vol. 1 of 2. New York: W.W. Munsell, 1884, 187, HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Syracuse Daily Standard (New York), 6 September 1895, 6. NewspaperArchive.com.
Thomas, Carla M. “Poema Morale”: An Edition from Cambridge, Trinity College B.14.52 (Master’s Thesis). Florida State University, 2008.
Vinckeboons, Joan. Manatus Gelegen op de Noo[r]t Riuier (Manhattan Lying on the North (i.e., Hudson) River), map. 1670 copy of a 1639 map. Library of Congress. Public domain image.
Photo credit: Unknown photographer, Bain News Service, c.1912. Library of Congress. Public domain image.