In the mid-1700s, an English nobleman named John Montagu held the title of 4th Earl of Sandwich, named after a small town on the southeast coast of England. The earl was famous - and slightly notorious - for spending long hours at the gambling tables, sometimes 24 hours at a stretch.
One night during a marathon card game, the story goes, the earl didn’t want to stop playing for dinner. He asked a servant to bring him some slices of cold roast beef tucked between two slices of bread, so he could eat with one hand and keep playing with the other. The other players were impressed and started ordering “the same as Sandwich.”
By 1762 the word “sandwich” was being used in everyday English to mean any food served between bread. The earl probably wasn’t the very first person to eat one - humans have been wrapping meat in bread for thousands of years - but he became the name on the label, and it stuck around forever.
