Random Island Name Generator

How this random island name generator works

Press Generate and you get an invented island name. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Every name is made up, and they come in two shapes. The Darkest Skerry, which is the word The plus an adjective plus a noun. And Kelvorne Cay, which is an invented word plus a noun.

The nouns are doing the heavy lifting, and every one of them names a real kind of thing. Which turns out to be a stricter requirement than it sounds, because island is one of the most precisely defined words in international law.

One sentence decides what an island is

You might think the word is loose. It is not. Enormous quantities of ocean depend on it.

Article 121 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea sets out the test. An island is land that formed by itself, has water all the way around it, and is above water at high tide.

Three conditions. Naturally formed, so a dredged sandbank does not count no matter how much concrete you pour on it. Surrounded by water. Above water at high tide.

Meet all three and the island earns a territorial sea, a contiguous zone, an exclusive economic zone and a continental shelf, exactly as a continent would. A speck of rock a few hundred metres across can carry with it an economic zone reaching two hundred nautical miles in every direction, which is an area larger than many countries.

That is why the sentence is short and why every word in it has been fought over.

The reef, which depends on the tide

A reef is the interesting case rather than the simple one.

A reef may be above water at high tide, in which case it is an island and it commands an ocean. Or it may vanish under the water twice a day, in which case it is a low-tide elevation and commands almost nothing.

The same rock. The same coordinates. The tide comes in, and the legal status of a great deal of sea changes.

Which is why the definition ends with the words "at high tide" rather than leaving it to the eye. Somebody had to decide when to look.

The rock that owns no ocean

There is a third paragraph to Article 121. It is one sentence long and it is the most argued-over sentence in the law of the sea.

A rock that cannot sustain human habitation, or an economic life of its own, gets no exclusive economic zone and no continental shelf.

So a rock is an island. Naturally formed, surrounded by water, above the tide. It gets a territorial sea. But it does not get the two hundred nautical miles, and the difference between a rock and an island is therefore the difference between a few square miles of sea and several hundred thousand.

The treaty never says how big a rock is, or what sustaining human habitation means, or whether putting a hut on it counts. Tribunals have argued about it for decades and will argue about it for decades more, and as sea levels rise the question of which islands remain above high tide stops being academic.

A thing that is legally an island and legally not entitled to an ocean. It is a real category, and one of the strangest in law.

Ait, holm, skerry, eyot

English has a startling number of words for small pieces of land in water, because English-speaking people spent a very long time bumping into them in the dark.

• Ait. A small island in a river. The Thames is full of them and almost nobody outside a rowing club has met the word.
• Eyot. The same thing, spelled the other way. A word with two spellings that both look wrong deserves both.
• Holm. A small island. It is hiding in the middle of Stockholm and at the end of Bornholm and Flatholm.
• Skerry. A small rocky island, and the reason a great many ships are on the bottom of the North Sea.
• Cay and Key. The same word twice, arrived by different routes, which is why the Florida Keys are keys and the Caribbean cays are cays.
• Stack. A pillar of rock the sea has cut away from a cliff and left standing.
• Shoal. Shallow water, or the bank that makes it shallow.

Three words sound as though they belong on that list and do not. A peninsula is the precise opposite of an island: land with water on most sides and a neck of ground joining it to the mainland. An enclave is territory surrounded by other territory, which is the one arrangement an island cannot have. A haven is a harbour, and a harbour is water. Sounding coastal is not the same as being land.

Ways people actually use this

• Fiction and games. This is what it is for, and it is good at it.
• Learning the vocabulary. Generate thirty and look up every noun you did not know. There will be some.
• Naming a boat, a house, a band. The adjective plus noun pattern is doing most of the work.
• Teaching the law of the sea. Generate a rock and an island and ask which one owns two hundred nautical miles of ocean.
• Not for real geography. Every name here is invented.

Getting more out of the filters

• Contains matches anywhere, so it works as a noun filter. Type Skerr to catch skerry and skerries at once, or Holm, Rock, Ait.
• Type Eyot for the river islands with the strangest spelling in English.
• Type The for the adjective names and skip the invented words entirely.
• Starts with and Ends with compare a single character. Ends with y gets every Skerry and Cay at once.

Questions people ask

What is the legal definition of an island?

Under Article 121 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, an island is land that formed naturally, is surrounded by water, and remains above water at high tide.

Is a peninsula an island?

No. A peninsula is joined to the mainland by a neck of land, so it is not surrounded by water. The presence of that neck is the whole distinction.

What is the difference between an island and a rock?

Both are naturally formed land above water at high tide. But a rock that cannot sustain human habitation or an economic life of its own receives no exclusive economic zone and no continental shelf. It gets a territorial sea and nothing more.

What is an ait?

A small island in a river, chiefly used of the Thames, and also spelled eyot. A skerry is a small rocky island, a holm is a small island, and a stack is a pillar of rock separated from a cliff by the sea.

Is a reef an island?

Only if it stays above water at high tide. If it disappears twice a day it is a low-tide elevation, and it generates almost no maritime entitlement at all.

References

1. UNCLOS Part VIII, Regime of Islands
2. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Part 8
3. The Regime of Islands and Sea-Level Rise