The 10 Largest Islands in the World (And Why Australia Doesn't Count)

The largest island in the world is Greenland, at roughly 2.13 million square kilometers — big enough to swallow France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the UK combined, with room to spare.

But start listing the runners-up and the trivia gets even better: the top ten includes the only island on Earth divided among three countries, the most linguistically diverse place on the planet, and no fewer than three enormous Arctic islands that all belong to a single country. And looming over the whole list is geography's most argued-about technicality: why doesn't Australia — obviously surrounded by water, obviously bigger than Greenland — count as an island at all?

Let's settle that first.

Why Isn't Australia the Largest Island?

Australia covers about 7.7 million square kilometers — more than three and a half times the size of Greenland. If it were classified as an island, it would win this list without breaking a sweat.

By convention, though, Australia is classified as a continent, or more precisely as the mainland of the continent sometimes called Australia or Oceania. There's no single official cutoff, but geographers point to several reasons:

• Scale: Australia is in a different size class entirely — closer to Europe than to Greenland.
• Tectonics: Australia sits on its own continental plate; Greenland is geologically part of the North American plate.
• Biology: Australia hosts a distinct, largely self-contained ecosystem — its famous marsupials evolved in isolation, the classic signature of a continent.

The practical rule most references use: a continent cannot be an island, and the largest island is the largest landmass that isn't a continent. That's Greenland. (Quiz-setters take note: "Is Australia an island?" remains one of the great debate-starting questions.)

1. Greenland — ~2,130,000 km²

Greenland is an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, which produces a wonderful mismatch: the world's largest island is administered by one of Europe's smaller countries — an island roughly 50 times the size of Denmark itself.

About 80% of Greenland lies under an ice sheet up to 3 kilometers thick, the largest body of ice on Earth after Antarctica's. Nearly all of its ~56,000 residents live on the narrow ice-free coastal fringe, making Greenland one of the least densely populated places in the world. Despite the name, it's overwhelmingly white with ice — while Iceland, its neighbor, is comparatively green. The naming was, at least in part, early medieval marketing by Erik the Red.

2. New Guinea — ~785,000 km²

The world's second-largest island is split down the middle by a nearly ruler-straight border: the western half is part of Indonesia, and the eastern half is the independent nation of Papua New Guinea.

New Guinea's superlative isn't just size — it's diversity. The island's rugged highlands isolated communities from each other for millennia, producing over 800 distinct languages, the highest linguistic density on Earth. Its mountain spine rises to Puncak Jaya (~4,884 m), the highest island peak in the world and home to some of the only equatorial glaciers.

3. Borneo — ~748,000 km²

Borneo holds a distinction no other island can claim: it's the only island in the world divided among three countries — Indonesia (Kalimantan), Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak), and the small, oil-rich sultanate of Brunei.

Its rainforests are among the oldest on Earth — older than the Amazon — and are the last shared habitat of orangutans, pygmy elephants, and clouded leopards. Borneo is also gaining a new claim to fame: Indonesia is building its new capital city, Nusantara, on the island's eastern coast.

4. Madagascar — ~587,000 km²

Madagascar broke away from the African mainland and later from the Indian subcontinent tens of millions of years ago, and its wildlife evolved in isolation ever since. The result: about 90% of its species exist nowhere else, from more than 100 kinds of lemurs to the towering baobab trees. Biologists sometimes call it the "eighth continent" for its biological distinctiveness — a nickname that conveniently ignores the classification rules we just discussed.

5. Baffin Island — ~507,000 km²

Here begins Canada's dominance of the list. Baffin Island, in the Arctic territory of Nunavut, is larger than Spain yet home to only around 13,000 people, most of them in the territorial capital, Iqaluit. Its fjord-slashed eastern coast and the granite walls of Auyuittuq National Park make it one of the most dramatic — and least visited — landscapes on the planet.

6. Sumatra — ~473,000 km²

Indonesia's second entry in the top ten sits directly on the Pacific Ring of Fire, along the fault that produced the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Sumatra is the only place on Earth where tigers, elephants, rhinos, and orangutans share the same forests — all four, sadly, critically endangered there.

7. Honshu — ~227,000 km²

Japan's main island is the top ten's population heavyweight: over 100 million people, more than every other island on this list combined. Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Mount Fuji are all on Honshu. It's proof that in island geography, area and importance are very different measurements — though even Honshu isn't the world's most populous island (see the FAQ below).

8. Victoria Island — ~217,000 km²

Canada again. Victoria Island straddles Nunavut and the Northwest Territories and is nearly the size of Great Britain — with a population of around 2,000. It also hides one of geography's best recursive facts: it contains the world's largest island within a lake within an island (an unnamed islet in a lake on Victoria Island).

9. Great Britain — ~209,000 km²

The largest island in Europe, containing England, Scotland, and Wales — but not the whole United Kingdom, and not the same thing as it either. If the distinction between Great Britain, the UK, and England trips you up, we've untangled it fully in our guide to the difference between the UK, Great Britain, and England. With around 65 million residents, Great Britain is second only to Honshu on this list for population.

10. Ellesmere Island — ~196,000 km²

Canada's third entry closes the list. Ellesmere is the most northerly island in the Canadian Arctic; its northern tip lies within 800 km of the North Pole, and the settlement of Alert on its coast is the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world. Fewer than 200 people live on an island bigger than half of Germany.

Quick Reference: The 10 Largest Islands

Rank	Island	Area (km²)	Country / Countries
1	Greenland	~2,130,000	Denmark (autonomous)
2	New Guinea	~785,000	Indonesia, Papua New Guinea
3	Borneo	~748,000	Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei
4	Madagascar	~587,000	Madagascar
5	Baffin Island	~507,000	Canada
6	Sumatra	~473,000	Indonesia
7	Honshu	~227,000	Japan
8	Victoria Island	~217,000	Canada
9	Great Britain	~209,000	United Kingdom
10	Ellesmere Island	~196,000	Canada

Patterns worth noticing: Canada and Indonesia each claim three of the top ten (counting shared islands), and only two of the ten — Madagascar and Great Britain — are dominated by a single sovereign state that matches the island's identity. Exactly one island in the top ten is its own country: Madagascar.

Just Missed the Cut: Islands 11–16

The next tier is just as quiz-worthy as the top ten:

Rank	Island	Area (km²)	Country
11	Sulawesi	~180,000	Indonesia
12	South Island	~145,800	New Zealand
13	Java	~129,900	Indonesia
14	North Island	~111,600	New Zealand
15	Luzon	~110,000	Philippines
16	Newfoundland	~108,900	Canada

A few highlights from this group:

• Sulawesi may be the strangest-shaped major island on Earth — four sprawling peninsulas that look like a letter K drawn by hand. Its coastline is enormous relative to its area, and no point on the island is more than about 100 km from the sea.
• New Zealand's two main islands both make the top 15, and in a mild geographic irony, the South Island is larger while the North Island holds most of the people — including Auckland and the capital, Wellington.
• Java is the headline act: the 13th largest island is the most populous island in the world, with around 150 million residents — more than Russia — packed into an area smaller than England and Scotland combined.
• Luzon is the political and demographic heart of the Philippines, home to Manila and more than half the country's population.
• Newfoundland rounds out the group and gives Canada a remarkable four islands in the top sixteen. It contains North America's easternmost point (Cape Spear), the continent's only confirmed Viking settlement (L'Anse aux Meadows, settled around 1000 AD), and famously keeps its own half-hour time zone, UTC−3:30. Slightly larger than both Cuba and Iceland, it was also the last province to join Canada — not until 1949.

Ranks 15 and 16 are close enough that some sources flip Luzon and Newfoundland depending on how coastlines are measured — a good reminder that island areas are estimates, not exact figures.