Channel Island, the name is Viking. The second element of the name is Old Norse ey "island" (compare Jersey); the first element uncertain, traditionally meaning "green," but perhaps rather representing a Viking personal name, such as Grani.
Like neighboring Jersey, its name also was taken as the word for a coarse, close-fitting vest of wool (1839), worn originally by seamen, and in Australia the word supplies many of the usages of jersey in U.S. As a type of cattle bred there, from 1784.
group of islands off the north coast of Scotland, from Old Norse Orkney-jar "Seal Islands," from orkn "seal," which is probably imitative of its bark. With Old Norse ey "island" (compare Jersey). Related: Orcadian; Orkneyman.
by 1779, named for Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, English astronomers who surveyed (1763-7) the disputed boundary between the colonial holdings of the Penns (Pennsylvania) and the Calverts (Maryland). It became the technical boundary between "free" and "slave" states after 1804, when the last slaveholding state above it (New Jersey) passed its abolition act. As the line between "the North" and "the South" in U.S. culture, it is attested by 1834.
used allusively from 1985, in reference to John Rambo, hero of Canadian-American author David Morrell's novel "First Blood" (1972), popularized as portrayed by Sylvester Stallone in the Hollywood movie version (1982), a U.S. Vietnam veteran, "macho and self-sufficient, and bent on violent retribution" [OED]. The family name is an old one in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (where Morrell supposedly first heard it), originally Swedish, sometimes said to represent Swedish place name Ramberget, or to be from French Huguenots who took refuge in Sweden.
famously pungent type of cheese, 1870, short for Limburger cheese (1817), from Limburg, province in northeast Belgium, where the cheese is made. The place name is from Germanic *lindo "lime tree" (see linden) + *burg "fortification."
Some frauds a few years ago started a Limburger cheese factory down in Keyport, New Jersey, but the imposition was soon exposed. A man could come within 300 yards of the spurious article without being knocked down, and as the smell never had any effect on the town clock the business was soon discontinued. [John E. Boyd, "The Berkeley Heroine and Others Stories," 1899]
