Archipelago

How to spell archipelago

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce archipelago

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does archipelago mean?

1. nounA large group or chain of islands scattered across a sea or stretch of water.

Archipelago in a sentence

• The Indonesian archipelago is made up of thousands of separate islands.

• We booked a sailing holiday around a remote tropical archipelago.

Where does archipelago come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word reached English in the 1500s from the Italian arcipelago, which was the name Italian sailors gave to the Aegean Sea, the stretch of water densely scattered with Greek islands. It was built from the Greek arkhi-, meaning 'chief' or 'principal', joined to pelagos, meaning 'sea' or 'open water'. So the original sense was something like 'the chief sea', a fitting title for that famously island-studded body of water. Because the Aegean was so full of islands, English speakers gradually shifted the meaning away from the specific sea and onto the islands themselves, so that today an archipelago is any large group or chain of islands. The 'ch' is pronounced as a hard 'k' precisely because it traces back to the Greek arkhi-, the same element found in 'architect' and 'archive', and that hidden Greek origin is exactly why the spelling keeps the unexpected 'ch'.

How the word is built

• archi- (chief, principal)
• pelago (sea, from Greek pelagos)