islet

For human anatomy, see Islets of Langerhans

Mōkōlea Rock in Kailua Bay, O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, 2.2 km off North Beach, Marine Corps Base Hawaii

An islet is a small island.

Types

As suggested by its origin as islette, an Old French diminutive of "isle",^[1] use of the term implies small size, but little attention is given to drawing an upper limit on its applicability.

• Rock - A "rock", in the sense of a type of islet, is a landform composed of rock, lying offshore, uninhabited, and having at most minimal vegetation.
• Sandbar - An exposed sandbar is another type of islet.
• Sea stack - A thin, vertical landform jutting out of a body of water.
• Subsidiary islets - A more technical application is to small land features, isolated by water, lying off the shore of a larger island. Likewise, any emergent land in an atoll is also called an islet.
  • Tidal island - Often small islands (not necesarilly always islets) which lie off the mainland of an area, being connected to it in low tide and isolated in high tide.
• River island - A small islet within the current of a river.
  • Ait - A term for river islands that occur within the River Thames in England.
  • Towhead - A Middle American term used to describe small river-bound islets of vegetation, most often within the Mississippi River.

Synonymous terms

Look up islet in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Holm or Holmen is a common suffix too in Nordic and northern European countries ("holme" means "islet" in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, although the meaning is more precise: a holme in Swedish is usually big enough for having wood and some fresh water but too small for a village; smaller islets have other names – there is an intricate name system to make it possible to remember and recognize different islets, hundreds of which have been important in some archipelagos).
• In the Caribbean and West Atlantic, islets are often called cays or keys. Rum Cay in the Bahamas and the Florida Keys off Florida are examples of islets.
• In the Channel Islands, they are often identified by the suffix -hou from the Norse -holm.
• In Scotland and Ireland, they are often called inches, from the Gaelic innis, which originally meant island, but has been supplanted to refer to smaller islands. In Ireland they are often termed skerries.
• In and around Polynesia, islets are widely known by the term motu, from the term for the coral-rubble islets common to the region.

List of islets

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

• Águila Islet, the southernmost point of The Americas
• Anton Rock, in Buck Lake, Ontario
• Aplin Islet (Queensland)
• Bay Islet or See Chau, Hong Kong
• Black Rock, South Atlantic
• Boundary Islet, Australia
• Briggs Islet, southeastern Australia
• Bushy Islet (Queensland)
• Chão, in the Madeira Islands, Portugal
• Cholmondeley Islet (Queensland)
• Columbretes Islands, Spain
• Cone Islet, southeastern Australia
• Douglas Islet (Queensland)
• Dugay Islet, southeastern Australia
• Edwards Islet, southeastern Australia
• Fastnet Rock, Ireland
• Filfla, southern Malta
• Flinder's Islet, South Coast NSW Australia
• Formigas, in the Azores islands
• Gáshólmur, Faroe Islands
• Granite Island (Australia), Victor Harbor, South Australia.
• Galatasaray Islet, Istanbul, Turkey
• Halfway Islet (Queensland)
• Imia/Kardak, between Greece and Turkey
• Islets of Caroline Island, in Kiribati
• Islets of Mauritius
• Jardine Islet (Queensland)
• Keelung Islet, off the northern shore of Taiwan
• Kolbeinsey, Iceland
• Liancourt Rocks, between Korea and Japan
• Magra Islet (Queensland)
• Martin Islet (New South Wales)
• Mid Woody Islet, southeastern Australia
• Milman Islet (Queensland)
• Modia Islets, located in the Ionian Sea of the Western coast of Greece.
• Monchique Islet, Europe's westernmost point, in the Azores, Portugal
• Montecristo, off the shore of Italy
• Oodaaq, Greenland
• Parece Vela, West Pacific
• Perejil Island, Strait of Gibraltar
• Penguin Islet (Tasmania)
• Rockall, North Atlantic
• Saint Peter and Saint Paul rocks, equatorial Atlantic
• Salas y Gómez, Northeast from Easter Island
• Saunders Islet (Queensland)
• Seacrow Islet, southeastern Australia
• Shag Rocks, South Atlantic
• Silver Islet, Ontario
• Sinclair Islet (Queensland)
• Skull Islet, in British Columbia, Canada
• Star Keys/Motuhope, New Zealand
• Saltholm, small Islet in Oresund west of Copenhagen
• Sue Islet (Queensland)
• Sunday Islet (Queensland)
• Thomson Islet (Queensland)
• Tindhólmur, Faroe Islands
• Vilkitsky Island, Arctic Ocean
• Wallace Islet (Queensland)
• Wachusett Reef, Ernest Legouve Reef, and Maria Theresa Reef, South Pacific Ocean
• Westward Islet, in the Pitcairn Islands

References

1. ^ Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, 1958