Islet

An islet is a very small, often unnamed

Definition

As suggested by its origin islette, an Old French diminutive of "isle",^[1] use of the term implies small size, but little attention is given to drawing an upper limit on its applicability.

The World Landforms website says, "An islet landform is generally considered to be a rock or small island that has little vegetation and cannot sustain human habitation", and further that size may vary from a few square feet to several square miles, with no specific rule pertaining to size.^[2]

Other terms

• Ait (/eɪt/, like eight) or eyot (/aɪ(ə)t, eɪt/), a small island. It is especially used to refer to river islands found on the River Thames and its tributaries in England.^[3][4][5]
• Bahamas and the Florida Keys off Florida
  are examples of islets.
• The French suffix
  Les Houmets, and off Normandy, such as Tatihou
  .
• Inch, a term used especially in Scotland, from the Gaelic innis, which originally meant island, but has been supplanted to refer to smaller islands, such the islet of Inch, off St Mary's Isle Priory, Inch Kenneth, Inchkeith, Keith Inch (no longer an island) and Inchcailloch.^[6]
• Motu, a reef islet formed by broken
  Motu Paahi
  .
• River island, an islet within the current of a river, such as the Île de la Cité in Paris.
• Rock, in the sense of a type of islet, is an uninhabited landform composed of exposed
  Palm Island group off Queensland
  , Australia.
• sandbar
  .
• Sea stack
  , a thin, vertical landform jutting out of a body of water.
• Skerry, a small rocky island, usually defined to be too small for habitation, especially in Ireland.
• Subsidiary islets, a more technical application, is applied to small land features isolated by water, lying off the shore of a larger island. Similarly, any emergent land in an atoll is also called an islet.^[8]
• Tidal island, small islands (not always islets) which lie closely off the coast of a mainland or a much larger island, being connected to it (and thus becomes a peninsula/promontory) in low tide and isolated by a channel in high tide.