Word.ws English Dictionary

Islands of the North Atlantic

Islands of the North Atlantic proper noun: great Britain, Ireland and surrounding smaller islands; the British and Irish Isles.

Proper noun

Islands of the North Atlantic

  1. (plural, rare) Great Britain, Ireland and surrounding smaller islands; the British and Irish Isles.
    • All of us in the islands of the North Atlantic should recognise new alignments are necessary and "we should be prepared to sacrifice for the new shared future".1982, World Faiths Insight
    • As the Islands of the North Atlantic were mapped and remapped in the early modern period, as maps were decorated and redecorated, the bodies of Britain's and Ireland's heterogeneous inhabitants were fashioned and refashioned...2002, David J. Baker, Willy Maley, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 153
  2. (plural) Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see islands, North Atlantic.

Synonyms of Islands of the North Atlantic

Origin of Islands of the North Atlantic

Suggested in 1980 by MP John Biggs-Davison as the name for what ultimately became the British-Irish Council, subsequently adopted as a replacement for the contested term British Isles. A contrived acronym suggesting Iona, an island with cultural ties to both Britain and Ireland.

Questions about Islands of the North Atlantic

What does Islands of the North Atlantic mean?
Islands of the North Atlantic means great Britain, Ireland and surrounding smaller islands; the British and Irish Isles.
What part of speech is Islands of the North Atlantic?
Islands of the North Atlantic is a proper noun.

Words near Islands of the North Atlantic in the dictionary

  1. islands of inversion
  2. islands of Reil
  3. islands of stability
  4. Islands of the Blessed
  5. Islands of the Blest
  6. Islands of the North Atlantic
  7. Islandside
  8. islandward
  9. islandwards
  10. islandwide
  11. islandwoman

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Islands of the North Atlantic (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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