Island
An island or isle is a piece of subcontinental land completely surrounded by water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, skerries, cays or keys. An island in a river or a lake island may be called an eyot or ait, and a small island off the coast may be called a holm. Sedimentary islands in the Ganges Delta are called chars. A grouping of geographically or geologically related islands, such as the Philippines, is referred to as an archipelago.
For other uses, see Island (disambiguation).
There are two main types of islands in the sea: continental islands and oceanic islands. There are also artificial islands (man-made islands).
There are about 900,000 official islands in the world. This number consists of all the officially-reported islands of each country. The total number of islands in the world is unknown. There may be hundreds of thousands of tiny islands that are unknown and uncounted.[1] The number of sea islands in the world is estimated to be more than 200,000. The total area of the world's sea islands is approx. 9,963,000 km2, which is similar to the area of Canada and accounts for roughly 1/15 (or 6.7%) of the total land area of Earth.[2]
Etymology
The word island derives from Middle English iland, from Old English igland (from ig or ieg, similarly meaning 'island' when used independently, and -land carrying its contemporary meaning; cf. Dutch eiland ("island"), German Eiland ("small island")).The spelling of the word was modified in the 15th century because of a false etymology caused by an incorrect association with the etymologically unrelated Old French loanword isle, which itself comes from the Latin word insula.[3][4] Old English ieg is actually a cognate of Swedish ö and German Aue, and more distantly related to Latin aqua (water).[5]
De-islanding
The process of de-islandisation is often concerning bridging, but there are other forms of linkages such as causeways: fixed transport links across narrow necks of water, some of which are only operative at low tides (e.g. that connecting Cornwall's St Michael's Mount to the peninsular mainland), while others (such as the Canso Causeway connecting Cape Breton to the Nova Scotia mainland) are usable all year round (aside from interruptions during storm surge periods).[30][31]
Some places may retain "island" in their names for historical reasons after being connected to a larger landmass by a land bridge or landfill, such as Coney Island and Coronado Island, though these are, strictly speaking, tied islands.[31] Conversely, when a piece of land is separated from the mainland by a man-made canal, for example the Peloponnese by the Corinth Canal, more or less the entirety of Fennoscandia by the White Sea Canal, or Marble Hill in northern Manhattan during the time between the building of the United States Ship Canal and the filling in of the Harlem River which surrounded the area, it is generally not considered an island.
Another type of connection is fostered by harbor walls/breakwaters that incorporate offshore islets into their structures, such as those in Sai harbor in northern Honshu, Japan, and the connection to the mainland which transformed Ilhéu do Diego from an islet. De-islanded through its fixed link to the mainland, the former islet's name, Ilhéu do Diego, became functionally redundant (and thereby archaic) and the location took the fort as its namesake. Some former island sites have retained designations as islands after the draining/subsidence of surrounding waters and their fixed linkage to land (England's Isle of Ely and Vancouver's Granville Island being respective cases in point). Their names are thereby archaic in that they reflect the islands' pasts rather than their present structures or transport logistics. Other examples include Singapore and its causeway, and the various Dutch delta islands, such as IJsselmonde.