As suggested by its origin as islette, an Old Frenchdiminutive 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.
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.
In Scotland and Ireland, they are often called inches, from the Gaelicinnis, which originally meant island, but has been supplanted to refer to smaller islands. In Ireland they are often termed skerries.
In the Channel Islands, they are often identified by the suffix -hou from the Norse -holmr.
Holm or Holmen is a common suffix too in Nordic and northern European lands ("holme" means "islet" in Swedish and Norwegian).
List of islets
Abagaitu Islet, China, in the Amur River, ceded by Russia
Encyclopedia
top
