Islet
Appearance
- For human anatomy, see Islets of Langerhans
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.
Towhead:
A small islet within the current of a 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).
- 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.
List of islets
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- Águila Islet, the southernmost point of The Americas
- Anton Rock, in Buck Lake, Ontario
- Aplin Islet (Queensland)
- Bay Islet or See Chau, Hong Kong
- Boundary Islet, Australia
- Briggs Islet, southeastern Australia
- Bushy Islet (Queensland)
- Chão, in the Madeira Islands, Portugal
- Cholmondeley Islet (Queensland)
- Cone Islet, southeastern Australia
- Dokdo, between Korea and Japan
- Douglas Islet (Queensland)
- Dugay Islet, southeastern Australia
- Edwards Islet, southeastern Australia
- Filfla, southern Malta
- 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
- Magra Islet (Queensland)
- Martin Islet (New South Wales)
- Mid Woody Islet, southeastern Australia
- Milman Islet (Queensland)
- Monchique Islet, Europe's westernmost point, in the Azores, Portugal
- Montecristo, off the shore of Italy
- Penguin Islet (Tasmania)
- Rockall
- Saunders Islet (Queensland)
- Seacrow Islet, southeastern Australia
- Silver Islet, Ontario
- Sinclair Islet (Queensland)
- Skull Islet, in British Columbia, Canada
- Star Keys/Motuhope, New Zealand
- Sue Islet (Queensland)
- Sunday Islet (Queensland)
- Thomson Islet (Queensland)
- Tindhólmur, Faroe Islands
- Wallace Islet (Queensland)
- Westward Islet, in the Pitcairn Islands
- Modia Islets, located in the Ionian Sea of the Western coast of Greece.