Word.ws English Dictionary

mainlands

mainlands is the plural of mainland.

Meaning of mainland

Noun

mainland (plural mainlands)

  1. The continent; the principal land, as distinguished from islands or a peninsula.
    • […]I got to the mainland, where, to my great comfort, I clambered up the cliffs of the shore and sat me down upon the grass, free from danger and quite out of the reach of the water.1719 May 6 (Gregorian calendar), [Daniel Defoe], The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, […], London: […] W[illiam] Taylor […], →OCLC
  2. The principal island of a group.
  3. (Northern Ireland) Great Britain.
    • All of the people I interviewed were from Protestant backgrounds, with proud British traditions. Yet when they set foot on the mainland, they were met at times with jeering, derision and othering from the very people with whom they were raised to believe they had the most in common.2024 February 10, Emma DeSouza, “The most effective cure for Northern Irish unionism? Attitudes in England”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

See all 6 meanings of mainland

Questions about mainlands

What is mainlands the plural of?
Mainlands is the plural of mainland.

Words near mainlands in the dictionary

  1. mainland clouded leopard
  2. mainland Europe
  3. mainlander
  4. mainlanders
  5. mainlandization
  6. mainlands
  7. mainlane
  8. mainlanes
  9. mainline
  10. mainlined
  11. mainliner

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mainlands (page history and authors); mainland (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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Cite this entry: “mainlands.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mainlands. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.