There was also support for the identification of the structure as a Roman road on etymological grounds. The early twentieth-century literary scholar Raymond Chambers argued that the name "Wade's causeway" is an example of Angle and Saxon settlers arriving in Britain and assigning the name of one of their heroes to a pre-existing local feature or area: if his argument that the structure was given its current name sometime during the Saxon era—between approximately 410 and 1066 AD—is accepted, then it must have been constructed before these dates. Atkin reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that the Norse morpheme "skeið" that is a partial root for "Skivick", a local name for a section of the structure, is commonly found amongst Roman structures are discernible by later Saxon or Viking settlers. Hayes and Rutter also identify the structure as a Roman road, but using a quite different etymological argument: they state that there is an absence among the names of settlements along the causeway of the Anglo-Saxon morphemes "ceaster" and "stret" and that, as per Codrington, these morphemes would be expected to be found in the names of several sites that lie alongside a former Roman road. They conclude that the absence of settlements with such names along the postulated extended course of Wade's Causeway indicates that the structure must already have been abandoned and of little significance by the Anglo-Saxon period (), most likely by around 120 AD, and must therefore be of early Roman origin.