The origin and meaning of Ely's name have always been regarded as obscure by place-name scholars, and are still disputed. The earliest record of the name is in the Latin text of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, where Bede wrote Elge. This is apparently not a Latin name, and subsequent Latin texts nearly all used the forms Elia, Eli, or Heli with inorganic H-. In Old English charters, and in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the spelling is usually Elig.
Skeat derived the name Ely from what he called "O[ld] Northumbrian" ēlġē, meaning "district of eels". This uses a hypothetical word *ġē, which is not recorded in isolation but thought by some to be related to the modern German word Gau, meaning "district". The theory is that the name then developed a vowel to become ēliġē, and was afterwards re-interpreted to mean "eel island"
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