Gravesend

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A town in Kent, England, on the south bank of the Thames estuary ; a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York City, bearing the same name
2. A riverside town in the English county of Kent near the Thames mouth ; a Brooklyn district in New York City that shares this name
3. An English town in Kent standing on the Thames estuary ; a New York City area in Brooklyn named after it

Etymology: The name looks like a warning about death, since it reads as "grave's end," but that is a folk etymology. The town's name is most likely an English place-name built from Old English elements, probably a personal or office name combined with a word for settlement, and the "-end" part is a later reshaping of what was once a different ending. Its older forms are not as tidy as the modern spelling suggests, so the "grave" reading owes more to how the name sounds than to how it was formed. The town itself, on the south bank of the Thames in Kent, has a more memorable story. Pocahontas, the Powhatan woman who had lived in Virginia, died there while preparing to return home, and she is buried in the local church. The name's association with the sea and the river was equally important, since ships waited at the town for favourable tides before heading up or down the estuary.