archipelago
Americannoun
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archipelagos,
plural
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archipelagoes
plural
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a large group or chain of islands.
the Malay Archipelago.
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any large body of water with many islands.
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the Archipelago, the Aegean Sea.
noun
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a group of islands
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a sea studded with islands
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A large group of islands.
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A sea, such as the Aegean, or an area in a sea containing a large number of scattered islands.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of archipelago
1495–1505; alteration ( archi- for arci- ) of Italian arcipelago, alteration of Egeopelago the Aegean Sea < Greek Aigaîon pélagos
Explanation
Now here's a word, archipelago, that is super-specific: it means a group of many islands. Wouldn't it be great to build your dream house in the Galapagos archipelago? It seems that archipelago came from the Italian Arciplago, the name for the Aegean Sea, which is full of many many islands. Somehow that became the word for any sea that is chock-full of islands. You can also use archipelago to indicate some other grouping that involves neither islands nor water but is similar to them. Your little sister might create an archipelago of Lego buildings on your living room carpet.
Vocabulary lists containing archipelago
Play by the Rules: Arch
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Language Gone Wrong: Words That Started Out as Errors
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Physical Geography - Introductory
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Zavodovski is part of the South Sandwich Islands, a remote archipelago north of the Antarctic continent which is a UK overseas territory.
From BBC ● Oct. 7, 2026
Military analysts, for instance, say it has established electronic warfare units on an archipelago of man-made islands in the South China Sea.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 6, 2026
Researchers then compared the model with real measurements from the Fram Strait, a passage between Greenland and the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 18, 2026
The Indonesian archipelago has more than 17,000 islands and ferries are a common form of transport.
From BBC ● Sep. 13, 2026
The Philippines is an archipelago in the western Pacific Ocean consisting of more than seven thousand islands, many of them uninhabited.
From "At Last She Stood" by Erin Entrada Kelly
Around 12 million years ago, the development of the circumpolar current helped other penguin groups spread through the sub-Antarctic, eventually colonizing remote islands and archipelagoes and reaching as far north as Africa and South America.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 22, 2026
Hanoi says it has actively ruled over the Paracels and the Spratlys archipelagoes since the 17th Century and that it has the documents to prove it.
From BBC ● Jan. 6, 2026
Over the last five years, 14 airfields have been opened or rebuilt along the Northern Sea Route; three fully autonomous bases have opened on Arctic archipelagoes.
From New York Times ● Apr. 20, 2020
Building on Wilson’s insights, scientists have discovered dozens of additional hot spots around the globe, accounting for other archipelagoes such as the Galapagos Islands and the Azores.
From Washington Post ● May 29, 2018
In particular, the Tongan Archipelago lies close enough to the Fijian, Samoan, and Wallis Archipelagoes to have permitted regular voyaging between archipelagoes, and eventually to permit Tongans to undertake the conquest of Fiji.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
Hundreds of thousands more breeding pairs of seabirds could return to remote island archipelagos if invasive rats were removed and native vegetation restored -- a new paper finds.
From Science Daily ● Jun. 18, 2024
Governments in these places are also investing in infrastructure to improve connectivity, which is essential in vast archipelagos like Indonesia and the Philippines.
From BBC ● Mar. 28, 2024
Vietnam is one of several countries to clash with China in the disputed South China Sea, particularly on two archipelagos, the Spratlys and the Paracel Islands.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 11, 2023
The yacht Grazie Mamma II carried its crew along the coastlines and archipelagos of the Mediterranean.
From New York Times ● Nov. 7, 2023
Miraculously it survives the humidity and our moves, with only a few unwarranted archipelagos of gray mold dotting its oceans.
From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
