Word.ws English Dictionary

Null Island

Null Island proper noun: the location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E).

Proper noun

Null Island

  1. (colloquial, humorous) The location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E).
    • Yup, that's why it's 'steer in that direction' .. maybe towards Null Island? :)2011 May 17, Sam Vekemans <acrosscanadatrails@gmail.com>, “Re: Alternate wiki to document tags”, in OSM fork mailing list, via Google Groups, archived from the original on 09 Feb 2026
    • About seven years ago, Mr. [Nathaniel Vaughn] Kelso, who had heard the phrase used by other cartographers, encoded Null Island as the default destination for mistakes into a widely used public-domain digital-mapping data set called Natural Earth, which has been downloaded several million times.2016 July 14, Robert Lee Hotz, “If You Get Directions Wrong, You'll Be Banished to Null Island”, in Wall Street Journal, via Proquest, →ISSN, page A1

Questions about Null Island

What does Null Island mean?
Null Island means the location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E).
What part of speech is Null Island?
Null Island is a proper noun.

Words near Null Island in the dictionary

  1. null edits
  2. null hypotheses
  3. null hypothesis
  4. null infinities
  5. null infinity
  6. Null Island
  7. null matrices
  8. null matrix
  9. null matrixes
  10. null modem
  11. null modems

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Null Island (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Null Island.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/null_island. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.