The 10 largest islands in the world

Greenland is the largest island on Earth, and it is not close: nearly three times New Guinea, the runner-up. Most world maps make it look even bigger than that — the Mercator projection stretches everything near the poles — but the honest figure is still enormous, about four times the size of France.

Australia is missing from this list on purpose. At three and a half times Greenland it is counted as a continent rather than an island — the conventional line between the two, and Greenland is exactly where it is drawn.

The top ten is a lesson in shared geography. New Guinea is split down the middle between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea along one of the straightest borders anywhere; Borneo is the only island in the world divided among three countries. Canada alone holds three of the ten — Baffin, Victoria and Ellesmere, all Arctic and almost empty — while Honshu, a fraction of their combined size, carries over a hundred million people.

Only one of the ten is a country in its own right: Madagascar. Greenland is a self-governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and the rest are pieces of larger states.

See all 10 on the map →

Areas are the conventional published figures (Wikipedia's list of islands by area, checked July 2026); the map's own island boxes measure slightly differently and may not match to the last km². Australia is treated as a continent, not an island.