Press the button for a random island: a real one, never a made-up name. The list holds the largest islands on Earth and smaller ones known around the world, from Greenland and Borneo to Capri and Bora Bora.
Read the full guide
How the islands were chosen
The first hundred are the largest islands by area that belong to a country and have an encyclopedia article of their own. The rest are smaller islands whose article exists in at least 66 other languages, our measure of widely known. Islands whose ownership is in dispute, and Antarctic islands that belong to no country, are left off, not ruled on.
A random island generator for quizzes and stories
Run a geography round with it: call out the island, take guesses at its country and its ocean, then show the card. After your first press a menu under the button reads Any ocean: choose Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, Indian or Mediterranean. Its last entry, More filters, adds Island countries and Inhabited.
Tips
A sea counts under its ocean: a Caribbean island is under Atlantic, and one in the Sea of Japan under Pacific.
Island countries keeps islands that share a name with a country and lie wholly inside it, so Ireland and Great Britain are left out.
Questions and answers
What is the largest island in the world?
Greenland, at about 814,000 square miles on the list this page follows. New Guinea, Borneo, Madagascar and Baffin Island come next. Australia is counted there as a continental landmass, not an island.
Are these real islands or made-up ones?
Real ones. Every card is an island you can find on a map, with its country, its sea or ocean and its area. For invented names for a map or a story, use the island name generator.
Why is a large island missing?
An island whose sovereignty is in active dispute is left off rather than ruled on. So are the Antarctic islands, which the source list gives no country, and two river-delta islands with too little written about them.
SicilyItaly. Mediterranean Sea. 9,840 sq mi (25,500 sq km). Highest point: Mount Etna.
In a river 1
Bananal IslandBrazil. In the Araguaia River. 7,400 sq mi (19,200 sq km). Listed as the world's second largest river island.
How this list was compiled: Own selection of 149 real islands, written for this page and checked on 2026-10-01. No name is invented. Two sets. (1) The 100 largest: the table of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_by_area read from the top down to its row 113, leaving out thirteen rows: six Antarctic islands that the table gives no country (rows 28, 31, 62, 86, 93 and 109), one unnamed island with no article (77), three islands whose sovereignty is in active dispute (37, 80 and 102), which are left off rather than ruled on, one island with no article of its own (100), and two river-delta islands whose articles say too little to check (91 and 99). (2) 49 smaller, widely known islands: of 130 smaller islands we looked up, those whose English Wikipedia article has versions in 66 or more other languages, leaving out twelve whose article covers a group of islands, a city borough, a province or a commune and not one island, or gives no area for the island. Area: for every island on that table, the table's own 2026 figure (it cites the Global Islands data of the United States Geological Survey, Esri and UNEP-WCMC); for smaller islands, the area in the infobox of the island's own article. Cards round to three figures and give square miles first. Country: the table's Nation column or the island's article; a territory is shown with its state in brackets. Sea or ocean (kept in x.water): a sea or ocean named in the island's own article; where the article names an ocean and no sea, the card gives the ocean; a strait that only parts an island from its neighbor is not used. The articles of 19 islands name no sea or ocean that the island lies in, and for those the water is taken from another article, whose address is kept in x.waterSrc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Archipelago for eight Canadian islands, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severnaya_Zemlya , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Islands , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Archipelago , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Islands_(archipelago) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeward_Islands for an island of each group, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad_and_Tobago for Trinidad, and the article of the sea itself for Bali and Lombok (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bali_Sea), Kyushu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_China_Sea), Halmahera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halmahera_Sea) and Seram (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceram_Sea). The Ocean filter puts each sea under the ocean that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_seas_on_Earth lists it under, the Mediterranean and its arms under Mediterranean Sea; one island (Bananal) lies in a river and has no ocean. Marajó, which the table lists as the largest river island, is filed under Atlantic Ocean because its own article calls it a coastal island at the mouth of the Amazon. The one fact on each card is, in this order: a largest-island note from the table; the highest point named in the article's infobox; Uninhabited or a rounded population from the infobox; or a capital, largest town or one plain line that a script found in the article text. Island countries are the ten islands that share a name with a sovereign country on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_island_countries and lie wholly inside it. Inhabited means the article gives a population above zero or the card names a town on the island. Every card keeps its article address in x.src. Wikipedia text is under CC BY-SA 4.0; facts are not copyrightable and no sentence is copied. Licence: Facts are not copyrightable. Selection, grouping and wording are own work