archipelago
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: derivation
Topics: geography
natural-sciences
Etymology: The noun is borrowed from Italian arcipelago (“Aegean Sea; group of many islands”), from arci- (variant of archi- (prefix meaning ‘foremost, primary’)) + pelago (“(open) sea”):
* Archi- is derived from Latin archi-, from Ancient Greek ᾰ̓ρχῐ- (ărkhĭ-, prefix denoting primary authority or importance), from ἄρχω (árkhō, “to begin; to lead, rule”) or ᾰ̓ρχός (ărkhós, “leader, ruler”); further etymology uncertain, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *h₂er- (“to fit, put together”) or *h₂ergʰ- (“to begin; to command, rule”).
* Pelago is from Latin pelagus (“sea”), from Ancient Greek πέλᾰγος (pélăgos, “sea”); further etymology uncertain, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₂- (“flat”) or a non-Indo-European language.
By surface analysis, archi- (prefix meaning ‘foremost, primary’) + -pelago (suffix meaning ‘sea’).
Noun sense 2.1 (“sea with many islands”) is from the fact that the Aegean Sea has many islands, and noun sense 2.2 (“group of many islands”) represents a shift of meaning from the sea to the islands in such a sea.
The verb is derived from the noun.
cognates
* Greek αρχιπέλαγος (archipélagos)
Inflected forms:
form: archipelagoes
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: archipelagos
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: Preceded by the, and often in the form Archipelago: the Aegean Sea.
pos: noun
tags: archaic
examples: [M]any other iles within the Archpelago that is yͤ Gulf be twix Grese and Turkye that cometh from the Grekes see in to the grete see before Constantynople, thorow the brace of Seynt George·
[W]hen in his imagination he had ſettled his rout, through Holland and France to Sicily, vvhich he had long vviſhed to ſee, and from thence to the Archipelago, he breathed freer, and felt himſelf more reconciled to exiſtence.
The long, lofty, and naked backbone of the island of Eubœa may be viewed as a continuance both of this chain and of the chain of Othrys: the line is farther prolonged by a series of islands in the Archipelago, Andros, Tênos, Mykonos, and Naxos, belonging to the group called the Cyclades of islands encircling the sacred centre of Delos.
gloss: A sea or other body of water with many islands.
pos: noun
tags: broadly
gloss: A group of many islands.
pos: noun
tags: broadly
collective
examples: I have not met with any account of the land birds being so tame, in any other quarter of the world, as at the Galapagos and Falkland Islands. And it may be observed that of the few archipelagoes of any size, which when discovered were uninhabited by man, these two are among the most important.
For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no [James] Cook or [George] Vancouver had ever sailed.
Such good progress had been made that at sunrise the lighthouse on the rocks of Landsort was visible, and the jagged masses of that archipelago of cloven isles which extends all the way to Tornea, began to stud the sea.
By the end of this "Spanish century", Spanish sailors had discovered and named the archipelagos of the Philippines, Marianas, Carolinas and Marquesas, New Guinea, the Santa Cruz Islands, the Solomons, Hawaii, Wake Island, Guam, Iwo Jima, the New Hebrides, Guadalcanal, the Gilbert Islands and the Marshall Islands, the Galapagos, Juan Fernandez, Flores and Bikini, as well as the Torres Strait and Austrialia or Australia, named in honour of the Spanish kings of the House of Austria, not to mention many other lands with whose names we are no longer familiar.
gloss: A thing comprising many other scattered things.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
examples: the Gulag Archipelago
[T]he continent was an archipelago of insulated communities, in which men were separated as much by their social jealousies as by the natural impediments to union and combination.
Beneath these talismans, white linen shone around the burnished reflections of the Atreides silver, which had been placed in precise arrangements along the great table—little archipelagos of service waiting beside crystal glasses, each setting squared off before a heavy wooden chair.
And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.
Perhaps these experiences—seeing so many holidays become indistinguishable three-day temporal archipelagos and learning that if I had waited a few more years I might have missed the siestas—led me to the concept of temporal conservation. […] The idea is not to save time in the time management sense; rather, it is to save times. Or at least to preserve some of them.
Derived words: archipelagal
archipelagian
archipelagic
archipelago big-eyed treefrog
archipelagoed
subarchipelago
Translations: