Word.ws English Dictionary

these islands

these islands noun: the archipelago in the North Atlantic comprising Great Britain, Ireland and surrounding islands.

Noun

these islands pl (plural only)

  1. (Ireland, plural, plural-only, rare) The archipelago in the North Atlantic comprising Great Britain, Ireland and surrounding islands.
    • Since the Lions only play outside the British Isles or these islands, the opportunity for Irish nationalists to insist that the former description should not be used has not been taken.2001, John McGarry, Northern Ireland and the Divided World: Post-Agreement Northern Ireland in Comparative Perspective, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 231
    • In all documents jointly drawn up by the British and Irish governments, the archipelago is simply referred to as "these islands."2010, World and Its Peoples, Marshall Cavendish, →ISBN, page 8
  2. (plural, plural-only) Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see these, islands.

Examples of these islands in a sentence

  • The west coast from Kerry north to Donegal has high cliffs interspersed with sandy beaches and one major estuary, that of the Shannon, the largest river in these islands.2010, Clive Hutchinson, Birds in Ireland, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 16:
  • Same-sex marriage proposals have been greenlit in Jersey and Guernsey - meaning that Northern Ireland is the only remaining part of these islands where marriage equality continues to be blocked.2016 April 26, Nick Duffy, “Isle of Man finally passes same-sex marriage”, in Pink News:

Synonyms of these islands

Origin of these islands

Circumlocution to avoid the word British in the phrase British Isles.

Questions about these islands

What does these islands mean?
These islands means the archipelago in the North Atlantic comprising Great Britain, Ireland and surrounding islands.
How do you use these islands in a sentence?
The west coast from Kerry north to Donegal has high cliffs interspersed with sandy beaches and one major estuary, that of the Shannon, the largest river in these islands.
What part of speech is these islands?
These islands is a noun.

Words near these islands in the dictionary

  1. thescelosaurid
  2. thescelosaurids
  3. thescelosaurs
  4. these
  5. these days
  6. these islands
  7. these ones
  8. these presents
  9. these things happen
  10. these words are not in the Bible
  11. these're

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: these islands (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: “these islands.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/these_islands. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.