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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See Examples For:

In the Philippines' Batanes archipelago, seaside highways shut as huge waves crashed onto the shore, and in southern Japan's Okinawa islands, power was cut to 15,000 homes.

From BBC ● Nov. 4, 2026

Last month, the Norwegian government introduced new regulations preventing ships bringing supplies to the archipelago from being seized.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 25, 2026

The lease sales will cover approximately 31 million acres over two areas off the US Pacific archipelago, with bidding set for November 19.

From Barron's ● Oct. 19, 2026

On Nov. 4, 1986, the U.S. entered into political union with the Northern Mariana Islands, a tiny archipelago in the western Pacific that most Americans could not locate on a map.

From Salon ● Oct. 13, 2026

That is true, for instance, of the Societies, Samoa, the Marquesas, and especially Hawaii, the Polynesian archipelago with the highest mountains.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

Golf is vastly different in the Hebrides, two archipelagoes off the west coast of Scotland, all but one of the islands accessible only by ferry.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 25, 2026

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

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

The distances between islands of the Tongan archipelago, as well as the distances between Tonga and neighboring archipelagoes, were sufficiently modest that a multi-island empire encompassing 40,000 people was eventually established.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

Is it a spoiler to share that a tsunami has wiped out most of Europe, leaving scattered archipelagos as repositories of things once known?

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 8, 2025

Boasting nearly 700,000 islands collectively, Sweden, Norway and Finland are home to the most islands in the world, their coastlines dotted by archipelagos that have shaped their history and culture.

From BBC ● Sep. 1, 2025

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

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

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